MONSTER NEXT DOOR

Neighbors Knew he was strange,

Never thought he was capable of slaughter

By David Greene

BRONX, NEW YORK, March 6- A community turned out to heckle a man who police say dismembered his mother and left her body parts with the trash, along several blocks of Eagle Avenue.

On February 27, detectives marched Bashid McLean, 23, out of the 40th Precinct station house after being charged in the gruesome murder of his mother Tonya Byrd, 52, whose remains had been discarded with the trash along several blocks of Eagle Avenue, a day earlier.

Wanda Collazo, who once lived next to Byrd before Byrd moved from the Allerton section, spoke to a local television news crew and sparked a debate over mental illness outside the police station.

Collazo stated, "He used to smoke coffee grinds, so my daughter was scared of him. She was scared that he might do something to the little baby. He robbed from her, he used to push her. She was a strong woman, but he was stronger."

Collazo's statement about McLean's  mental condition sparked outrage from an unidentified woman, who fired back, "The government is the one who lets these people get away with this. Every time someone does something they say they have mental problems, they can't all have mental problems."

"He really does have issues," Collazo would reply.

A man in the growing crowd, offered, "He's going to regret what he's done when he gets upstate. That's wrong, man."

Another man speaking with several journalists, gave them a bizarre aspect of the case that was later confirmed by police, stating, "A detective told me that he (McLean) had a picture on his cellphone of him and he was holding his mother's head."

The mental illness debate continued across the street at the Dunkin' Donuts, where a man who owned a nightclub where Byrd was a waitress back in the 1990's, argued,"Even though he's mentally unstable, you still have to have some kind of brains that after you chop her up, put her in garbage bags, your not that crazy... a crazy person would just leave the parts in the apartment."

The unidentified man added, "He should be put to death by lethal injection."

Appearing in court wearing a garbage bag because officials say he kept urinating on himself, McLean was charged with second-degree murder and unlawful dissection of a human body and was being held without bail.

Police would also charge a cohort, identified in court documents as William Harris, who has been charged with assisting McLean in chopping up and dumping Byrd's body.