Michael Brea, bit-part ‘Ugly Betty’ actor, says, ‘I didn’t kill her. I killed the demon inside her’
Michael Brea, bit-part ‘Ugly Betty’ actor, says, ‘I didn’t kill her. I killed the demon inside her’
An unhinged actor Thursday calmly described hacking his beloved mother to death with a sword because he believed a demon had taken hold of her soul.
“I didn’t kill her. I killed the demon inside her,” Michael Brea said in a chilling hourlong interview with the Daily News in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital.
When told his mother, Yannick Brea, 55, had died in the grisly assault early Tuesday, Michael was unrepentant.
“So be it. It was the work of God,” he said.
Speaking with white-hot intensity and unflinching confidence, Brea described a shadowy descent into a world filled with Masonic symbolism and black magic beginning late Sunday when he snapped awake.
“I was sleeping in my bedroom. God came above my bed and reached his arm to me,” said Brea, wearing a light-blue prison jumpsuit and slippers. He told his tale while sitting unhandcuffed on a blue chair behind a wood table.
“I said, ‘God, is my time on earth over?’ I heard a voice say, ‘Yes Michael, today is your last day.’ I asked if I could say goodbye to my family.”
The 31-year-old Brea said he told no one about the dream, but the following afternoon, he said he received another sign while at the Prince Hall Masonic Temple in Harlem, which he’d joined a week earlier.
There, he said, a man approached and tried to put a curse on him.
“[He] kept trying to put something in my hand but wouldn’t show it to me. I kept opening my hand. It was a Freemason pin. I wouldn’t touch it,” Brea said.
Felt like Neo from ‘The Matrix’
He began feeling ill and left, and while riding the train back to Brooklyn, he said, strangers began speaking to him about his mother.
“I felt like Neo from ‘The Matrix.’ I began hearing voices and feeling powerful,” Brea said. “They were asking about the difference between mom and mother. It was a sign.”
When he returned to the family’s Prospect Heights apartment, the bit-part actor who once appeared on “Ugly Betty,” hugged his mother, a God-fearing Haitian immigrant with whom relatives say he had long been very close.
“I knew I would never see my mother again,” he said. “I gave her lots of love.”
He went to his room and lit candles, placed a dagger and a 3-foot ceremonial Freemason sword by his side.
Investigators said he had stolen the sword from the Masonic lodge, but Brea insisted his father had given it to him when he was a child.
“It’s a powerful sword,” he said.
Brea also arranged three saint cards around him – including one of Saint Jude holding a sword.
His mother then knocked on the door and asked him to go to the kitchen and pour water from a pot in which she was cooking three chickens.
Friday November 26th, 2010 @ 10:31pm
It’s too bad that even if I show these fundies they still won’t find fault within their own faith but instead the actions of this man (which was inspired by faith). Bullshit.
Saturday November 27th, 2010 @ 12:00pm
“Where’s the harm?” we hear all the time. The harm, my dear not-so-fundie-religious type is that your beliefs kill people. YOU may not kill people because of them, but other people, on reading the same words you do, take them as license to kill. Why? Because they, like you, refuse to think about them critically and ask if they really mean what you think they mean. When you tell me “my religion is about peace” I say “you have not read your sacred book, then”.
Saturday November 27th, 2010 @ 8:03pm
Their books put more emphasis on human “pieces” than human “peace.”
Saturday November 27th, 2010 @ 10:55pm
I think this guy is obviously off his rocker. If it wasn’t inspired by Christianity, I’m sure he would have still gone bonkers and killed his mom…he just would have come up with a different crazy story as to why he did it.
Sunday November 28th, 2010 @ 11:30pm
I was surprised to confirm that this was not originally written by The Onion.