A Lucas County Common Pleas Court judge expects to decide next week whether Lecorius Reynolds, 35, understood that what he did was wrong when he beat and stabbed a housemate to death last year and dumped the victim’s body on nearby railroad tracks.

Judge Myron Duhart said Thursday he needed time to deliberate and appreciated both sides “utmost professionalism” during the four-day trial stemming from the May 2, 2014, death of Roy Roberts, 51, whose body was struck by a train near Gibbons Street and Airline Avenue.

Mr. Reynolds, who admitted to homicide detectives and then to doctors that he killed Mr. Roberts, is charged with murder along two different legal pathways: that he deliberately killed the victim or that death was the unintentional result of a felonious assault.

Judge Duhart’s verdict in the bench trial may hinge on the degree to which he accepts the diverging opinions of psychologists for the defense and the state.

Dr. John Matthew Fabian, a Cleveland clinical and forensic psychologist called by the defense, testified Wednesday that Mr. Reynolds’ explanation that he attacked Mr. Roberts in response to an alleged sexual advance toward him in his room at 129 Dale St. was not a sane motive, but rather was “based on a delusion that is relative to schizophrenic and paranoid behavior in response to the perceived attack.”

Dr. Aracelis Rivera, a clinical psychologist with Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare in Columbus, called by prosecutors as a rebuttal witness, agreed that “Mr. Reynolds suffered from a mental disease” but argued it did not cause him inability to know the wrongfulness of his actions.

His retrieval, use, and washing of the knife with which he stabbed Mr. Roberts in the neck — according to a county autopsy, the fatal blow — as well as his efforts to clean up some of the blood, hide the body, and then dump the body in a way that might suggest the victim had committed suicide were all “goal-directed behavior,” Dr. Rivera said.

“It was set there [on the tracks] to stage a suicide scene — to deflect attention from this very bad murder,” Mark Herr, an assistant county prosecutor, said during closing arguments Thursday.

Defense lawyer Mark Geudtner countered that even during his hours-long police interrogation, Mr. Reynolds appeared to be in “a fog of psychosis” made evident by several statements he made to detectives and reinforced by inappropriate sexual behavior in jail and “bizarre, nonsensical writings” to court officials.

The defense also has presented self-defense as an alternative theory to the case, along with suggesting that a voluntary manslaughter charge might be more fitting than murder.

Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.

First Published December 11, 2015, 5:00 a.m.