The homeless woman accused of stabbing a California mom as she changed her baby inside a Macy’s Herald Square bathroom told The Post “voices” in her head ordered her to “kill.”
“It said that I had to go to Macy’s and kill someone,” Kerri Aherne said during an exclusive jailhouse interview Saturday.
Aherne – who still had blood under her fingernails Saturday as she sat in the visitor’s center of the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island, where she is being held on an attempted murder charge – described in chilling detail how the attack unfolded.
The 43-year-old former home health aid from Massachusetts took a green cab from her transitional housing unit at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center to the famed department store, she said.
She bought a smooth, foot-long kitchen knife on the 8th floor with $150 she got from a social worker before she left the housing unit.
Then, Aherne said, she went to the 7th floor.
“The voice said, ‘Kill someone in the bathroom or you will die.’
She entered the bathroom and saw a woman changing a baby.
“I stabbed her in the back.”
The victim began “screaming for help. She was screaming for someone to call 911.
“I was covered in blood,” she added.
She has heard such voices since she was six-years-old, said Aherne, who also faces assault, child endangerment and weapons possession charges.
“I am being tortured by the government,” she insisted. “They put words into my head. They told me that I had to kill or they would kill me.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to kill anyone,” Aherne said. “It’s not me. It’s the government’s fault. They are telling me to do it and that’s why I want to sue them.”
Prosecutors say the attack unfolded around 3:10 p.m. Thursday inside a seventh-floor bathroom at the Midtown flagship store, where the 38-year-old tourist had taken her 10-month-old daughter to be changed.
The baby was not hurt, and the mother was able to fight off her attacker before help arrived, authorities said.
The post Homeless woman accused of stabbing tourist at Macy’s says voices ordered her to ‘kill’: ‘I am being tortured’ appeared first on New York Post.
