PSYCHO SON
Kid, 19, charged with murder in beating of filmmaker mom
A MANHATTAN teenager was charged Tuesday with murdering his mother — an English teacher and author who begged a 911 operator for help while being pummeled to death.
Cops who rushed to the W. 55th St. home found Karyn Kay, 63, who worked at one of the city’s most prestigious high schools, face-up and unconscious on her living room floor.
Her 19-year-old son, mixed-martial arts fan Henry Wachtel, was covered in blood and babbling apologies to his dying mother, witnesses said.
“He was screaming, ‘I’m sorry, mommy! I’m sorry, mommy!’ over and over and over,” said a neighbor who lives three doors down from Kay’s 10th-floor apartment.
Officers hauled Wachtel, a college student, from the apartment in handcuffs and took him to the Midtown North Precinct stationhouse for questioning.
“He kept apologizing to his mother the whole time — he kept saying, ‘I didn’t mean it,’” neighbor Jonathan Cohen, 49, said the building’s doorman told him.
It was unclear what provoked the 9:30 a.m. explosion of violence in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment that Kay and Wachtel shared.
But the screaming woman told a 911 operator that her son was having a seizure when he started hitting her.
Kay was badly battered — her injuries included a fractured skull and eye socket and broken ribs — and died at New York Pres by terian/ weill Cornell Medical Center at 1:52 p.m., police sources said.
There was no indication Wachtel used anything but his fists in the attack.
“He was extremely upset, wailing and crying,” said a neighbor.
“When they took Karyn out on a stretcher, she wasn’t moving and her face was covered up with cloth,” he added.
Cohen said Wachtel was a student at Fordham University and had health problems.
His mother, an English teacher at LaGuardia High School and an instructor at Pratt Institute, had expressed concern about his volatile behavior.
“He was having anger issues, she didn’t know why,” said Irena Meletiu, 35, who was Kay’s Zumba instructor.
“Her son had seizures. Recently she said, ‘I’m very worried about my son, he’s getting really angry lately.’”
Wachtel’s Facebook page did not contain any unusual posts, though he did write about a month ago that his cat, a pet of 15 years, had just died.
Kay’s Pratt bio notes that she wrote “Call Me” — a 1988 feature film starring Steve Buscemi about a woman who witnesses a murder.
Laguardia students were horrified by her death, saying she was a devoted educator.
“This woman had so much faith in each and every one of her students,” said former pupil Jelani Cornick. “She never gave up on us. ... She took her time out to help me because she cared.”
Laguardia senior Alessandra Rao called her “a beautiful woman inside and out.”
“Ms. Kay believed in all of us — she found beauty in so many of our pieces, and truly made each one of us feel special,” she said.
Willy Rodriguez, 21, of Manhattan, who had Kay as a teacher during his senior year, remembered her love of The Three Stooges.
“No matter how many times she saw them, she’d laugh out loud,” he said. “She was really happy all the time.”
“She used to talk about her son a lot,” he added. “She’d say she had a son our age and she understood why we behaved the way we did, moving around and not listening,” he said.
Wachtel starred in a short film called “Our Time,” where he’s seen bizarrely shaving off his hair in the trailer.
“The Henry I know is a great guy and he’s an amazing actor,” said director of “Our Time” Tatianna Kantorowicz, who declined to comment any further.
Building residents were distraught in the hours following Kay’s murder. “Two lives destroyed,” Cohen said. “Poor thing,” another neighbor said of Kay. “But I’m not surprised abut it — there was always so many screaming matches coming from that apartment.”