PANAMA CITY — A three-judge panel in Connecticut Monday began the work of deciding whether a man arrested in Lynn Haven on charges he killed and ate pieces of a homeless man is guilty of murder or insane.
The Connecticut Post said the allegations turned Tyree Smith from a nobody into “Bridgeport’s Hannibal Lecter.” He was arrested in January 2012 on a murder warrant at a home on Illinois Avenue.
According to police records, Smith went to his cousin’s home in Bridgeport on a December morning and told her he had to get blood on his hands. He returned the next day with blood on his hands, clothes and an ax, she said.
Smith told his cousin he had returned to his former house to sleep on the porch, and he was invited inside by Angel Gonzalez, a homeless man who was squatting at the house. He told his cousin he used the ax to kill Gonzalez and then took pieces of his body to his brother’s grave, where he ate them and washed them down with wine.
More than a month went by before a building inspector found Gonzalez’s body. Smith’s cousin came forward and he became the prime suspect.
Smith got on a bus to Florida on the day Gonzalez’s body was found. He stayed with a woman who later told police she had known him for years, and during his visit she noticed he was mentally unstable and was having trouble separating reality from the fantasy stories he had been reading. She told police he had been to a mental health treatment facility on the day he was arrested.
Smith, 36, faces up 60 years in prison if he’s convicted of murder, according to the Post. On the other hand, he could be released if he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity and the judges determine he’s not a danger to himself or others. Or he could be committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life.
Smith’s attorney plans to call two Yale University psychologists as witnesses to support the insanity defense, while prosecutors will call police and forensics experts, The Post reported.