Cannibal had chopsticks

BRIDGEPORT -- Sitting at the defense table, Tyree Lincoln Smith brushed the long bang of knotted hair from his eyes and stared up at the movie screen on the other side of the courtroom Monday afternoon.

He was sitting between Detectives Harold Dimbo and Keith Bryant as they began to question him on a video about his involvement in the hacking death of Angel "Tun Tun" Gonzalez.

"OK. Now when you say you killed him, how did you go about doing it?" Dimbo asked.

"I just kept hitting him in the head with the hatchet and I just kept hitting him and hitting him till he fell down and I took his eyes out, and then I took part of his brain out and I ate them," Smith calmly answered.

Back at the defense table, Smith was vigorously rubbing his hands together as if trying to stay warm.

In the back of the courtroom, Gonzalez's sister-in-law, Talitha Frazier, was crying.

"Did you eat both eyes?" Bryant asked.

"Yes," Smith answered. "They needed eyes to see in the spirit realm."

Smith, 35, is before a three-judge panel in state Superior Court, charged with the murder of Gonzalez, a homeless man who was living in a vacant apartment on Brooks Street. Police said that on Dec. 15, 2011, Smith hacked up Gonzalez with an axe, then cannibalized the body. The decomposed corpse was discovered 39 days later.

Smith is claiming insanity; the defense case is to begin July 8. The prosecution rested its case Monday afternoon.

Earlier Monday, Smith's first cousin, Nichole Rabb, testified that he had taken the bus from his Florida home in December 2011 to stay with her at her Seaview Avenue home.

Under questioning by State's Attorney John Smriga, Rabb said her cousin was acting strangely and carrying a book bag. She testified Smith told her he was going to Beardsley Park, then to his former home on Brooks Street.

"He said he was going to look for someone, anyone, who nobody cared about," she said. Then, her eyes going wide, she added: "He said he was going to get blood. He was going to kill someone and get his blood."

When she saw him the next evening, she noticed what appeared to be specks of blood on his pants and he was carrying chopsticks and a bloody axe.

Under cross examination by Public Defender Joseph Bruckmann, Rabb said Smith kept calling her Athena and referred to himself as not being from this planet. Later, while he took a bath, she heard two different voices coming from the bathroom.

"I knew I had to get him out of my apartment," she said.

In January 2012, Bridgeport police, acting upon the directions Smith provided them, searched a stream bed on the city's East Side for the weapon that killed a homeless man, according to testimony in Smith's trial Monday.

"He told us he had used a small hatchet he had purchased at Walmart, and when we searched the area we found a small metal hatchet that had a reddish stain on it," testified Police Lt. Christopher LaMaine. Nearby, he said they found an empty sake bottle.

"Why was that significant?" asked Smriga.

"It was significant because he (Smith) said he had washed down the brain and eyeball with sake; it was his drink of choice," answered LaMaine.

Associate State Medical Examiner Frank Evangelista later testified that Gonzalez died as a result of blunt head trauma.

"The eyes weren't there and I don't know for sure how they became absent," he said.  SA