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Pankaj Bhasin, 37, killed Bradford Jackson, a stranger to him, in 2018. A year later, a Virginia court determined that Bhasin was legally insane at the time of the killing, the Washington Post reported at the time.
Doctors at the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute now say he's well enough to leave the facility after two years of treatment, and a judge has agreed to allow him a conditional release, NBC4 reports.
Bhasin — who has ties to Blackwood and East Brunswick, NJ, according to online records — will be required to take medication and undergo alcohol and drug testing as conditions of his release as well as have his location tracked and monitored. A review hearing will re-evaluate his case in December.
He will be allowed to live with his parents in Alexandria or Fairfax counties or move into an apartment with ties to a mental health agency as long as one of his parents lives nearby, the news station said.
But allowing Bhasin to return to the community that he once terrorized is something that friends of the man he killed say is unthinkable.
“Anyone that’s capable of doing that is capable of doing that again,” Jackson's friend Sarah Bryen told NBC4.
Bhasin drove from his New Jersey home on July 13, 2018, to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, but the staff kicked him out for behaving strangely in the lobby, the Washington Post reported. He then made his way to Old Town Alexandria where he saw Jackson and followed him to the store where he worked. The two had never met before.
When Jackson confronted him, Bhasin struck. He stabbed the 65-year-old 53 times with a box cutter and gouged out his eyes, reports from the trial said.
He told police and a psychiatrist later that Jackson had started turning into a werewolf and that he needed to kill the man to “save 99 percent of the moon and planets," the Washington Post said.
Five doctors diagnosed Bhasin with bipolar disorder with psychotic features in the lead up to his first trial. That ended in a mistrial when the jury couldn't return a verdict, reports said. During his second trial, Bhasin pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
A psychiatrist hired by the state agreed with the defense's doctors: Bhasin was clinically insane when he killed Jackson. A judge committed him to Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute for treatment.
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