Yekaterina Pusepa has been convicted of attempted murder after stabbing her boyfriend.
Pusepa, 23, was born in Latvia and lives in New York City. She stabbed her boyfriend in May 2012 after she said the boyfriend, Alec Katsnelson, punched her in the head.
“I picked up the knife just to scare him. … I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she said in court.
The blade of the 9-inch kitchen knife went through Katsnelson’s chest and peirced his lung, reported the New York Daily News.
Tatiana Rylko, 73, Pusepa’s grandmother, cried after the sentence.
Using Google Translate, she said that her granddaughter defended herself.
“And where was the state and the people?” she wondered.
The couple had been drinking heavily on the night of the stabbing, Pusepa told the jury, reported the New York Post.
The night had already taken a bad turn when she asked Katsnelson to look after her bag, which had her phone, keys, and other belongings inside, while she went to the bathroom, but when she got back she found it unattended.
After they went back to their apartment in lower Manahttan, Katsnelson received a phone message from another woman, which Pusepa didn’t take well, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors didn’t believe the self-defense story but Pusepa said that’s what it was.
“He was kicking me and started punching me, then hit me upside the head, and that’s when I grabbed the knife,’’ she said.
“He went to go swing at me again. That’s when I stabbed him.”
