LaVaughn Barnes sobbed to the 911 operator, claiming to have made a gruesome discovery in some bamboo outside his sister’s Brookland home.

“I just went into my backyard and there was like a human corpse,” he said, according to a 911 call played Friday in D.C. Superior Court. “I’m still trying to get it together.”

When police arrived, he told them that he believed animals had fed off the body, and begged them, “Please don’t leave me,” the officer’s body camera shows.

But according to prosecutors, it was a ruse. Two weeks later, after multiple interviews with D.C. homicide detectives, Barnes allegedly said he killed the man whose remains had been found: Abdulio Arias-Lopez, a 59-year-old immigrant from Guatemala who worked as a handyman at the home in the 1300 block of Kearny Street NE.

“I did it. I lied to you. I was scared of the truth,” Barnes said in a recorded interview.

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At a court hearing Friday, federal prosecutors aired the footage and audio of Barnes’s interviews and contacts with law enforcement, arguing that they showed he had repeatedly lied to authorities to cover up a gruesome crime.

Barnes was arrested in late February and charged with second-degree murder in Arias-Lopez’s death. On Friday, federal prosecutors elevated the charge to first-degree, premeditated murder. Barnes, standing next to his attorney, pleaded not guilty.

Anthony Matthews, Barnes’s attorney with the Public Defender Service, objected to the video and audio being played in court, saying it was not important to determining whether he could be released from the D.C. jail as he awaits trial.

Matthews argued that Barnes, 32 at the time of the killing, had no prior arrests and that he was having a “possible mental health issue.” He said his client did not pose a flight risk, though if Judge Robert Okun ordered him released pending trial, his attorneys would have to find housing for him because his sister said he could not return to her home.

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“If the court is concerned my client, who has depended on his sister his entire life, will end up in Bali if he is released, than that is absurd,” Matthews said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Liebman countered that the recordings were evidence that Barnes “faked fear” and that his crimes could not be explained by mental health challenges.

Okun said he probably would not make a decision on whether to release Barnes until next week, after a follow-up court hearing.

The gruesome discovery in early February roiled the Brookland neighborhood. Police revealed early on that they had recovered decomposed human remains in the home’s yard, but they called the case merely a “death investigation” and said nothing of a grisly detail: The body had been dismembered.

All the while, they were talking to Barnes, who lived in the basement of the home.

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Barnes initially told police that Arias-Lopez did work for the family and that in November they had expected him to come to the house to paint the kitchen, authorities said. But Arias-Lopez, he claimed, never showed up.

In an interview played in court Friday, D.C. police homicide detective Michael Fulton asked Barnes about a machete, shears and knives the detectives noticed in the basement. Investigators also asked about the fresh paint and drywall.

Barnes told the detectives that he had planned to use the shears to cut the bamboo in his backyard, when he instead found the body.

But two weeks after that initial interview, Fulton met with Barnes in a homeless shelter where Barnes was staying. A social worker at the shelter told the detective that Barnes, who suffered from depression and anxiety, had earlier been hospitalized under a psychiatric emergency program. But he was ready, she said, to describe what really happened to the handyman in his backyard.

Barnes told a homicide detective that he Tasered Arias-Lopez in the back of his head, then dragged his body into the backyard, according to audio of the interview.

“I have to tell my truth. I am sorry. I repented to God. The truth shall set you free. I am very sorry for what I have done,” he told the detective, adding, “You have your people execute me. I am so very sorry.”

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