He is charged with brutally murdering his girlfriend and his three-year-old daughter a year ago. The daughter was nearly decapitated. I first reported the case last May, here, when authorities called him a “monster” with a long criminal record.
Note that the reporter opens his story referring to the “frail-voiced” killer (good coaching by his lawyers?). Looks like the mental illness from African trauma defense again. Only yesterday we had the kid on Staten Island, here.
From the Alexandria Times:
A frail-voiced Simon Bahta pled not guilty by reason of insanity to murdering his 3-year-old daughter and ex-girlfriend Monday at Alexandria’s courthouse.
Alexandria police found 27-year-old Seble Tessema and the former couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Eden, dead in Tessema’s West End apartment on April 11, 2010. Both of their throats were slit and Tessema was stabbed 40 times, authorities said.
Police arrested Bahta, 35, also known as Simon Asfeha, in New York later that month after a national manhunt.
Nearly a year later, the defense’s case rests on Bahta was psychotic at the time of the slayings. Public defender Melinda Douglas used the gruesome crime scene to claim her client’s innocence Monday.
[…..]
Bahta’s lawyers will prove several years of mental illness stemming from his forced conscription into the Ethiopian army as a 14-year-old during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War….
No mention in this story of whether he was a refugee resettled by one of the federal contractors or an asylee who got into the US illegally and then asked for (and was granted) political asylum. He was one or the other because there is no mention of illegal status.
By the way, the man on trial for murder also used the name Simon Bahta Asfeha, so am not sure why the full name is not being used here.