The ex-girlfriend of disgraced pol Hiram Monserrate was convicted Monday for a bloody, samurai sword attack on her fiance — and got hauled off to jail in handcuffs to await sentencing.
Karla Barba sobbed, “Please! Please!” and turned frantically toward weeping relatives in the gallery as court officers hauled her out of Queens Criminal Court.
Barba, 40, faces a maximum seven years in prison for her conviction on second-degree assault.
Jurors also found her guilty of two counts of endangering the welfare of a child but acquitted her on the top charges of first-degree assault and attempted first-degree assault.
Defense lawyer Stacey Richman pleaded for Barba to remain free on $100,000 bail pending her scheduled Feb. 21 sentencing, saying “she is devoted to her daughter.”
But Judge Deborah Stevens Modica responded that “there are circumstances that have changed, including being convicted of endangering the welfare of that daughter.”
Barba tearfully testified last week that she didn’t mean to repeatedly slice Franklin Larrea’s left arm during a June 8, 2016, fight in the Jackson Heights home they shared with their daughter and his son.
Barba initially whacked Larrea on the head with the sword while it was inside a scabbard, but the sheath fell off as she swung the weapon at him two more times, slashing his forearm and wrist to the bone.
“Accidents happen,” she told the jury.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown called the attack “horrific” and said it’s “amazing the victim survived.”
“The walls and doors of the apartment were splattered with blood and the floors covered in puddles of blood,” Brown added.
Larrea — who needed an emergency transfusion to replace the blood he lost — was in court for Monday’s verdict and broke down in tears afterward.
“It was just an accident. We said that from the beginning. We told the jury it was as accident,” he said.
Outside court, Richman also called Barba “factually innocent of the charges.”
“I don’t believe she had the intent. The jury cut it the way they saw it,” she said.
Richman’s bizarre choice of words followed a closing argument in which she described her client as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
Barba’s claim that she cut Larrea accidentally echoed her defense of Monserrate following a 2008 fight in which he slashed her face with a broken glass.
Monserrate was convicted of misdemeanor assault in that case, which led to his 2010 expulsion from the state Senate.
He later served a two-year federal prison term for scamming nearly $100,000 in taxpayer funds while serving on the City Council in 2006.