A cannibal who hacked a homeless Connecticut man to death before devouring his brain and “oyster-tasting” eyeballs stunned a courtroom by saying sorry to his victim’s family.
Tyree Lincoln Smith, 35, stood up Monday seconds after being sentenced for up to 60 years in a psychiatric hospital to plead forgiveness for slaying Angel “Tun Tun” Gonzalez.
“I’m really sorry for what I did, that I couldn’t be myself,” Smith told a shocked gallery. “It really had nothing to do with the other person.”
His surprisingly candid confession sparked Gonzalez’s relative Talitha Frazier to break down in tears.
“We waited two years to hear Tyree say he was sorry,” she told the Connecticut Post. “What he said today caught me off guard, but I feel he meant what he said.”
In July, Smith was found not guilty by reason of insanity of murdering Gonzalez inside his abandonded Bridgeport, Conn., childhood home in December 2011.
A three-judge panel agreed Smith killed the vagabond, but ruled he “hadn’t committed murder per se” due to mental illness.
The judges, who could have ordered Smith’s release, met again on Monday to decide his fate — sentencing him for up to 60 years in a secure hospital unit in Middletown.
“It is overwhelmingly clear that his discharge from custody would constitute a danger to himself and others,” said Superior Court judge John Kavanewsky.
The court earlier heard Smith, who lived in Florida, smashed Gonzalez’s face with an axe.
Removing parts of his victim’s brain and eyes, which he said “tasted like oysters,” he sat down in a cemetery and washed them down with sake.
He then went to Subway for a sandwich.
Smith’s cousin Nicole Rabb testified that he turned up at her door the day before the killing “talking about Greek gods and ruminating about needing to go out and get blood.”
The following evening she said specks of blood were on his pants and he was carrying chopsticks and a bloody ax.
She kicked him out of her apartment and contacted police. Officers found Gonzalez’s mutilated body in a vacant apartment one month later in January 2012.
