A STUDENT has been cleared of murdering his mum, but has been found guilty of knifing her to death.
Emmanuel Kalejaiye, 21, killed Tolo Kalejaiye at the home they shared in Wethersfield Way, Wickford, last September.
The jury, who did not believe his elaborate account of a gang forcing him to kill her, found him guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Yesterday at Chelmsford Crown Court, Judge Christopher Ball QC said: “He is capable of a very deliberate and calculating act of supreme violence.”
For this reason, the judge said he wanted Kalejaiye looked at by a psychiatrist before sentencing.
The emphasis will be on the paranoid schizophrenia Kalejaiye was suffering at the time he killed his 44-year-old mother.
It took the jury, of seven women and five men, five and a half hours to return their unanimous verdict.
The trial heard Kalejaiye had told detectives he had killed his mother as she subjected him to a lifetime of mental and physical abuse.
He had said: “She used the Bible to rationalise with me, she brainwashed me. I tried to overcome it, but I could not take it any more.”
Then he changed his story claiming a ruthless gang of masked men had forced him to stab her.
He said the gang ordered him to write down details of the “murder plan” on pieces of paper.
The “plan” involved buying rubber gloves, knives, a hammer, lighter fuel and pink clothing to impersonate her. The jury didn’t believe it.
Kalejaiye was examined by a psychiatrist and the conclusion of a report was he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a depressive disorder.
Kalejaiye’s father had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, the court heard.
The court heard Kalejaiye was described as “weird” by fellow students at Essex University and used to lock himself away in his room, where he had a collection of urine samples.
After her death, Kalejaiye dressed in a pink hoodie, pink jogging bottoms and wore his mother’s pink flip-flops to move her car.
This ruse was aimed at making neighbours think his mother had gone to work.
But his plan unravelled when his mother managed to phone her boyfriend and leave a distressed voicemail saying her son was stabbing her.
Police soon found the body of Tolu Kalejaiye on the kitchen floor and officers found a mass of evidence to link him to the death.
Kalejaiye will return to court for sentence in June and was remanded in custody until then.
There was no application for bail.
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