NEW YORK — The mentally ill 19-year-old accused of decapitating his mother’s boyfriend wanted to chop up his body, in part by using a blender, police sources said.

But Damien Hurstel’s plan was short-circuited when his sister got home and found the mutilated body of Anthony Casalaspro, 45, in the bathtub, the sources said.

When police showed up at the scene — the family’s Cary Avenue home in West Brighton — Hurstel stepped outside to surrender.

Hurstel confessed to detectives that he killed Casalaspro by pounding him over the head with a meat tenderizer then cutting his head off, sources said.

The suspect, sources said, was apparently miffed because the victim earlier had intervened in an argument he was having with his mother.

Hurstel, wearing a blue hospital gown, sat upright in a hospital bed with a blank expression on his face when he was arraigned for murder via video hookup in Staten Island Criminal Court Wednesday afternoon.

“After the victim had died the defendant has stated that he then severed the head,” Assistant District Attorney Amy Bedford said in court.

Judge Biju Koshy ordered the suspect held without bail. Hurstel is due back in court Friday.

Hurstel’s lawyer Mark Fonte requested his client be put on suicide watch and receive medical and psychiatric care.

“Our prayers go out to everybody involved in this senseless tragedy,” Fonte said in a statement after the arraignment. “We ask the public to withhold judgment. Damien Hurstel is an extremely troubled young man with a long documented history of mental health issues. Our firm is aggressively trying pursue his psychiatric history so we can get a complete picture of the circumstances leading up this tragedy.”

Casalaspro’s loved ones are outraged by his slaying.

“This is horrendous,” the victim’s ex-wife, Valerie Casalaspro, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview Tuesday. “I’m shattered.”

She said her ex, a recently retired sanitation worker, always tried to do the right thing by the suspect.

“He was literally just at the kid’s graduation from high school,” she said. “So this is a complete shock and disgusting. I mean that is just grisly, to cut somebody’s head off. I am disgusted, and I want justice to be served.”

Trouble had seemingly been brewing in the home for years.

Anthony Casalaspro’s girlfriend had called cops five times on him in recent years, sources said, accusing him of breaking things in the home on one occasion and slapping Hurstel on another.

At the same time, he was having trouble dealing with the suspect, the ex-wife said.

“He told me (Hurstel) was always very angry, no matter what Anthony asked him to do, like, ‘Clean up, do the dishes.’ He always fought with him about it. He always would say, ‘You’re not my father, you can’t tell me what to do,” Valerie Casalaspro said. “Very not appreciative of the fact that Anthony was literally taking care of him and the sister and the mother. I know they didn’t get along.”

But her ex “didn’t think (Hurstel) was going to be violent because he was a teenager,” she said.

Hurstel, however, had been having psychological problems, his mother told police, according to sources, and had been on various medications.

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