Jury Hears Sapry’s Confession

By Michael Mortensen
THE LACONIA DAILY SUN
LACONIA — Jurors listened Wednesday as accused murderer Hassan Sapry, in a 3½-year-old recording, admitted to killing Wilfred Guzman Sr. in an assault on April 18, 2019.

“I couldn’t control myself … I know I did it,” Sapry said during a nearly three-hour interrogation with two State Police officers in the evening of April 26, 2109, the day he was arrested in Guzman’s death.

The jury listened to the 2-hour-and-40-minute recording of the interview conducted at Laconia Police headquarters by State Police Sgt. Stephen McAulay and Trooper Kelly Warner during which Sapry answered questions about the events that took place in Guzman’s Blueberry Lane apartment, as well as occurrences in the months and years before the killing, and as his actions afterward.

At the outset, Sapry waived his right not to answer questions or call for the services of an attorney. He was cooperative and seemingly composed throughout the interview and answered all the questions directly.

The background noise in the recording often made it difficult to clearly understand what Sapry and the two officers were saying. The jury as well as the attorneys and Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Leonard were each given copies of the typed transcript to help them better follow the interview.

Sapry is on trial for first- and second-degree murder and other charges connected with Guzman’s death. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Early in the interview, Sapry, his voice choking with emotion, confessed to killing Guzman during the heat of an argument shortly after midnight of April 17, 2019, which started after the two men had been visiting and watching television for two hours.

Sapry said that his anger toward Guzman had been building for months over insulting remarks he had made about Sapry’s Islamic religion, and racial slurs.

As they sat at Guzman’s kitchen table having a snack, Sapry said, “I grabbed the knife and started attacking, I just started grabbing everything I could see — knife, forks, anything.”

The fight moved into the living room but soon returned to the kitchen when Sapry said he shoved Guzman’s head into the glass panel in the oven door and then hit him with a tube television set.

At one point Guzman attempted to escape through the back door of the apartment which was in the kitchen, but Sapry pulled him back inside and continued to attack him, he said.

For a time, Guzman fought back.

“I just kept trying to push [him] away and then he stopped fighting back,” Sapry said.

As Guzman lay on the kitchen floor dying, Sapry said he stood there and watched.

“He just kept repeating something in Spanish,” Sapry told the officers.

He told officers the attack lasted between 10 and 12 minutes.

Prior to listening to the recording of the interview, the jury heard testimony from Dr. Christine James, who performed the autopsy on Guzman on April 20, 2019, at the state Medical Examiner’s Office.

James said Guzman’s body had more than 140 wounds. Eighty of those were inflicted to Guzman’s head, neck, and his arms, wrists and hands. She noted that the autopsy showed there were 44 injuries to his hands alone. There were another 11 injuries to the trunk of his body, she said.

Some of the wounds were superficial, she testified. But others were deadly.

She said Guzman died due to blunt-force trauma to his skull which caused bleeding between the skull and the brain, and a stab wound to the right side of his face which exited at the back of his neck near the jugular vein.

But James said that even if Guzman had not sustained those two critical injuries he would have died from loss of blood due to his numerous wounds.

In the interview after his arrest, Sapry said he had been plagued by homicidal thoughts for years. But he only began having thoughts of killing Guzman in 2018 when Guzman made the insulting remarks while the two were on a hike.

At one point in the interview he said he had made up his mind on Monday, April 15, 2019, to kill Guzman.

“I walked in knowing it was going to happen,” he said.

But later on he told the officers that he had not gone to see Guzman with malicious intent.

“I just wanted to go to him and say everything would be all right, and hug him, and [tell him] he was my friend,” he said.

During opening arguments on Monday, Sapry’s lead attorney, Mark Sisti, told the court that Sapry suffers from a severe mental illness triggered by witnessing atrocities while a child in Baghdad, Iraq, including a suicide bombing at his school, a car with occupants inside incinerated by a roadside bomb, and the kidnapping of his father, Ali Hassan, during which his father was brutally tortured.

He told officers that for years he had recurring dreams about killing people, but the thoughts about killing Guzman did not start until he had a dream about him in 2018.

At times, he confessed, he felt he could control the dreams, only for them to return and get worse.

In cross-examining McAulay, Sapry’s co-counsel Wade Harwood asked, “Didn’t he say that for years and years he had been having trouble with thoughts about hurting people, about killing people?”

“Yes,” McAulay replied.

At times during the playing of the interview, Sapry appeared emotional. At times he wiped his eyes with a tissue and at other moments, he buried his face in his hands or bowed his head for extended periods.

Testimony in the trial, which is expected to run two weeks, resumes Thursday morning at 9 a.m.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.