The Brooklyn pimp who was convicted last year of dismembering his prostitute girlfriend and keeping her head in his freezer was sentenced to four to eight years in prison on Friday after hearing a statement from the victim’s family in which they branded him an “evil monster.”
Somorie Moses, 43, was convicted in November of negligent homicide for the Jan. 12, 2017 killing of 32-year-old Leondra Foster and concealing her dismembered corpse — disposing of portions in a Bronx trash dump and keeping others in his freezer.
But a Brooklyn jury let Moses, a registered sex offender who went by the handle “Sugar Bear,” skate on a second-degree murder charge when it handed up its verdict, which means he can spend no more than eight years in prison for his ghoulish deed.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Ruth Shillingford gave Moses two-to-four year sentences on each count — and told Moses she hopes he will end up doing the longest possible sentence.
“It is the court’s hope and intention that you serve the full eight years, no less,” the judge said.
Shillingford also said that, when Moses took the stand in his own defense during his three-week trial, he calmly discussed emotionally and physically abusing Foster and threatening to kill her.
“The admission with respect to the physical abuse that he rained down on her, as if it’s of course part of the game, it’s part of what you do,” the judge said. “I suppose that served to dehumanize her when you took four hours to decapitate and destroy her.”
After Shillingford meted out her sentence, Assistant District Attorney Sabeeha Madni read a victim impact statement from Foster’s family in which they said they are left with Foster’s final moments of “agony” and “terror.”
“She was reduced to the girlfriend of an evil monster,” the statement read. Moses, dressed in a white T-shirt and tan jail-issued pants, did not visibly react to the sentence. He answered “No, ma’am” when Shillingford asked if he had anything to add.
Julie Clark, Moses’ lawyer, argued throughout the trial that Foster was using meth in the hours before her death and that she was assaulted by a john who solicited her services in the Flatbush apartment where Moses and Foster lived together.
Medical examiners determined that Foster died of blunt force trauma.
After the alleged attack, Moses’ lawyer argued, Foster fell in the shower multiple times. During the trial, Clark denied that Moses killed Foster — but did not dispute that her client chopped up Foster and got rid of her torso by handing it off to an old acquaintance who worked as a commercial trash hauler.
Clark said that Moses, a sex trafficker with a criminal record who kept cocaine and a gun at his apartment, wanted to avoid getting the police involved.
“We admitted that right from our opening statements and we never deviated from that,” Clark said at the sentencing.
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