A Brooklyn woman decapitated her neighbor, a mother of four, as she begged for her life — and scattered the body parts across two Long Island counties, authorities said Thursday.
“No, Lee! No, Lee! What you doing? Oh no! Oh no! . . . I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” were the last words that Chinelle LaToya Thompson Browne cried out to Leah Cuevas, 42, during a July 5 fight over the rent, according to prosecutors.
The next thing their Brownsville neighbors heard were blood-curdling screams — as Cuevas hacked off Browne’s head with “a sharp instrument,” prosecutors said. Cuevas then dismembered Browne, a Guyanese immigrant, and spread her limbs and torso across Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Cuevas was arrested Wednesday and dragged before a judge Thursday at the First District Court in Central Islip, where her attorney entered a plea of not guilty.
Judge G. Ann Spelman ordered that Cuevas be remanded without bail, saying she was charged with “the worst conduct that humans can be capable of.”
Prosecutors believe Cuevas was “pretending to be the landlord” after the building’s real owner passed away last year — though she has not been charged with defrauding any tenants.
She collected rent despite the building’s lack of hot water and scant electricity — and Browne finally got fed up and decided to stop paying. She wanted to move out of the dilapidated Sumpter Street building — and Cuevas became furious.
Things got so bad that on the night before the slaying, the NYPD had to separate the two women.
The following night, Cuevas approached Browne in her apartment and tried to give her one last chance to pay up.
When she refused, Cuevas attacked her, stabbing her repeatedly in the throat and chest until she decapitated Browne.
Browne’s dismembered torso was discovered in a wooded lot near the Fire Island ferry terminal in Bay Shore on July 9, authorities said. Her severed legs were found nearby.
Days later, the woman’s arms were found in separate yards in Hempstead, about 25 miles west of Bay Shore, and her severed head was discovered at another home on July 17, the prosecutor said.
Browne’s husband, Dale Browne, said his wife moved to New York about a year ago and worked in a Manhattan department store.
He planned to move from Guyana to New York with their four children after he got his paperwork completed.
“When the prosecutor described the words that she screamed out, I can hear those words,” he told reporters. “It’s animalistic. It’s a beast that did this.”
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