A Chester County man is on trial for killing his girlfriend. Was it murder or a drunken assault taken too far?

Annabel Meenan was at a crossroads in her life in November 2021, prosecutors in Chester County said Monday. Her longtime boyfriend was tightening his control over her life, jealous of another man he had invited into their relationship.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she said in a video captured by a surveillance camera in the East Vincent Township mobile home she shared with Leroy Brahm III. “Who the [expletive] am I dating?”

Three weeks later, the 21-year-old was dead, beaten brutally by Brahm, 33, even as she used her last bits of strength to crawl away from the assault, prosecutors say. The attack, they said, was captured by the same surveillance camera Brahm had set up to keep watch on Meenan.

Brahm’s trial on charges of first- and third-degree murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and related crimes began Monday with Deputy District Attorney Kate Wright describing the repeated abuse that Brahm inflicted on Meenan as their “relationship circled the drain.” At one point, Wright said, Brahm kicked Meenan in the leg so hard that he fractured one of her shin bones.

“The truest way to know a man’s mind is to look at his actions,” Wright told jurors. “For Leroy Brahm, those actions were a merciless beating against his girlfriend.”

Brahm’s attorney, Scott McIntosh, said his client “saw red” and snapped in a moment of provocation, and that his actions that night were fueled by heavy drinking. They were not, he stressed, a premeditated killing.

“We like to think we have control of our faculties,” McIntosh said, “but when drugs and alcohol are involved, maybe we don’t.”

On Dec. 3, 2021, after a night of drinking at the Black Horse Tavern in Phoenixville, Brahm and Meenan got into an argument in their home on Buttonwood Avenue, Wright said. Brahm began to punch Meenan and slammed her head into their cat’s litter box.

The assault escalated from there, according to the prosecutor. Brahm dragged Meenan by her hair throughout the house, then jumped and stomped on her body, hard enough at one point to knock a hole into the drywall. In between these bouts of abuse, Brahm went into his bedroom to collect himself, Wright said.

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Brahm returned to knock Meenan off the couch she had been sitting on, and flipped the piece of furniture on top of her. He then sat on the couch, eventually falling asleep on it.

The next morning, Brahm woke up, discovered her dead, and spent 26 minutes cleaning up the apartment and changing his clothes before making a tearful phone call to police, according to Wright.

But she urged jurors not take his display of emotion seriously.

When police arrived at the couple’s home, they found it in disarray, with blood on some of the walls, Wright said. Meenan was lying face down, unresponsive, in the living room. She was “clearly dead,” Wright said, cold to the touch, without a pulse, and bearing bruises, bite marks and other injuries throughout her body.

Brahm explained the injuries as the result of “rough sex.” And throughout his interactions with police, he seemed unbothered, prosecutors said, even joking and laughing with medics after Meenan was taken away.

She was later ruled to have died from cardiac arrest, with the beating by Brahm and cocaine she had consumed earlier that night as contributing factors.

In their investigation, detectives learned that the couple had met Kevin Walters a year before, and that, with Brahm’s encouragement and permission, Walters had begun having sex with Meenan.

But, Wright said, Brahm began to grow jealous after seeing that Meenan and Walters had grown close. She had begun dating Walters behind his back, something he long suspected but discovered after confronting her at Walters’ home in October 2021.

“The defendant was done allowing Annabel to choose Kevin over him,” Wright said. “So he made the choice to never make that a possibility again.”

But McIntosh, Brahm’s attorney, said his client and Meenan had actually begun to patch things up at the time of her death. He urged jurors not to let the couple’s “unusual relationship” influence them.

“They don’t live like we do. It’s a lot of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll,” he said. “But the problem with threesomes is that someone is going to catch feelings, and that was not the deal.”

McIntosh said Brahm admits guilt for beating Meenan and wants to take responsibility. But he said prosecutors cannot prove that the abuse, and not the cocaine, was the cause of her death.

The trial is expected to the last through Friday before Chester County Court Judge Alita Rovito.