By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — It's the last thing a mother expects to find in her son's bedroom — the corpse of a woman he allegedly strangled.
"I just found a body in my apartment," accused killer Michael Lenahan's mother said in an emotionally-subdued call that was played for the jury Thursday in Lenahan's murder trial.
"A dead body?" the dispatcher said on the 911 recording.
"I believe so," the mother, Dorcas Chin, responded.
The 32-year-old Lenahan allegedly strangled his date, Lorna Santiago, 24, in his Chinatown apartment after taking her to dinner and to Rick's Cabaret, a midtown strip club, on Oct. 7, 2007.
Lenahan watched sadomasochist porn and searched "how to preserve a dead body" on the Web while Santiago's body decomposed on his bed for three days before Chin walked in and discovered it, prosecutors said.
Chin testified that her son tearfully confided that he had injured a girl and was worried that she might press charges. He told her he took the girl to St. Vincent's Hospital for treatment, Chin said.
Lenahan lived alone with his grandmother at 20 Confucius Plaza in an apartment that often smelled of paint because he was an aspiring artist, Chin testified.
She went to Lenahan's apartment, she said, when her daughter told her there may have been a body there — a prospect she did not immediately believe because of what her son had told her before, she said.
Lenahan faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
