Simone Sebastian
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — The Chinatown man accused of choking his date to death allegedly scrawled an enraged account of her grisly end on his bedroom wall, as her body decomposed on his bed.
NYPD Detective Jose Rodriguez read aloud the written message, which blamed Lenahan's mother for the fatal incident, during the 32-year-old artist's trial Monday.
"This never would have happened if I had my own place to do my work," Lenahan wrote. "When you take away an artist's ability to do his work, you drive him insane. ... So fuck you, Mom."
Prosecutors submitted the written message, along with Lenahan's written and video-taped statements to police, into testimony Monday. Lenahan's mother, Dorcas Chin, discovered 24-year-old Lorna Santiago's body in her son's bed in October 2007.
In his recorded statements, Lenahan told police that Santiago asked him to take her to a strip club, Rick's Cabaret, where he said he paid $110 for lap dances for both of them.
He said she asked for a place to spend that Sunday night, since she lived in New Jersey. In his apartment, he said she jumped into his bed naked. But, Lenahan said, Santiago refused to have sex with him.
The following morning, Lenahan said he asked Santiago, 24, to pay him back for the lap dances. Their loud argument became physical, he said, when she punched him in the rib cage and swung at his face. Lenahan said he tried to restrain Santiago by spinning her around and putting an arm across her neck.
"Calm down! Calm down! Calm down!" he said he yelled at her, as she flailed her arms and grasped at his head behind her.
"It sounds so fucked up. Aw, man," Lenahan said in the video-taped statement, cradling his face in his hands.
Detective Rodriguez said Lenahan first told police he strangled Santiago for 10 minutes. But he quickly changed his answer to five minutes, before changing it again to one minute.
"I don't know what I was thinking," Lenahan said in the video-taped interrogation. "I really don't know what I was thinking."
He said he tried to revive Santiago, whom he says he met a month earlier through a mutual friend, with CPR. When he realized she was dead, he picked her body off the floor and put it on his bed, he said.
Lenahan said he slept on a chair in his room, because he couldn't bring himself to share his bed with Santiago's decaying body.
During the next couple of days, Lenahan told police he went to a pool hall, an internet cafe and a Duane Reade to get a cinnamon-apple candle to cover up the smell of decaying flesh in his room.
He also returned to Rick's Cabaret, where he bought two $20 lap dances before taking a stripper into a private room.
Johanna Martinez, the former stripper who danced for Lenahan, testified Monday that he gave her an iPod that evening.
Lenahan claimed he found the iPod in a taxi, the 36-year-old former dancer testified. But Martinez said that when she later plugged the iPod into a computer, the name "Lorna" — the name of Lenahan's alleged victim — came up on the screen.
The dancer testified Lenahan smelled "rotten" and "funky" when she kissed his chest in the private room that morning. Martinez said Lenahan touched her a couple of times, but stopped when she asked him to and apologized.
"He grabbed my two arms, as if he wanted to pin me," Martinez said.
The former stripper also said Lenahan bemoaned a series of physical handicaps he said he had. He told her he was having "relationship difficulty" because "he cannot have an erection or penile function."
Lenahan faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
