By Léa Khayata
The trial of Teon Brummell, 33, accused of the stabbing murder of his girlfriend, began yesterday with the testimony of psychiatrist Dr. Sanford L. Drob, who said Brummell suffered from a borderline personality disorder and said that the murder was “a severe case of loss of control.”
Brummell is charged with second degree murder for beating and stabbing Natasha Southerland, 21, in their apartment on Hemlock street on September 20, 2004. Brummell was later found in his car that he had just crashed, and taken to the hospital for an overdose of Tylenol. He told the police that he thought he killed Southerland because she was seeing another man, but he claimed he didn’t remember actually doing it.
Drob, testifying for the defense, was in the middle of his explanation of what he described as Brummell’s “abused and disruptive childhood” when Brummell suddenly stood up and broke out in loud sobs. His mother, sitting in the back of the room, started crying too. The judge, Deborah Dowling, ordered the trial into an abrupt recess for lunch.
Drob testified that Brummell’s trauma accumulated over time, “like a pressure cooker,” the result of the death of his older brother in a car accident, an abusive father, against whom he had an “unresolved rage,” and the “intense” relationship he had with Southerland, which involved frequent fights. All these stressors culminated in the murder and Brummell’s subsequent black out, Drob said.
During cross examination, prosecution attorney Edward Purce attempted to establish that there were numerous incoherencies in Brummell’s recollection of facts, as presented in Dr Drob’s report, and suggested that the inconsistencies were due to “exaggeration” rather than to borderline disorder.
The prosecutor concluded his cross examination by asking Drob if leaving the crime scene as Brummell did was consistent with someone running away so as not to get caught. “Yes,” Drob said. “Is it consistent with feeling guilty?” Purce then asked. “Yes,” Drob said.
After the defense rested its case, the prosecution called Andya Foxworth, a young Black woman who was identified as Southerland’s best friend.
The two women were living together when Southerland met Brummell. “I encouraged her to date him. I told her ‘Why not! What do you have to lose?’” Foxworth said she talked at length with the victim on the phone the night Southerland was murdered.
“She told me she was afraid because he kept repeating to her that he didn’t know what he was going to do to her,” Foxworth testified. As soon as Foxworth finished her testimony and left the court room, she burst out into tears.
The trial is expected to continue tomorrow as the presecution calls two more witnesses. The jury should start deliberation as soon as Monday, according to the judge.
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