A 32-year-old man was convicted Tuesday of the shotgun killing of a woman walking on a Hollywood sidewalk with her boyfriend last year in what authorities believe was an attack precipitated by a financial dispute.
The Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated just over a day before finding Ezeoma Chigozie Obioha guilty of first-degree murder for the July 5, 2015, death of Carrie Melvin, along with the special circumstance allegation of murder for financial gain and an allegation that he personally and intentionally discharged a shotgun.
Melvin, 30, was shot to death while walking with her boyfriend near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and McCadden Place.
The prosecution alleged that the killing resulted from a business dispute.
At a hearing in March, a Los Angeles Police Department detective testified that state labor officials told him that a settlement conference had been set last July 27 to deal with a claim for just over $1,700 that Melvin had filed against Obioha stemming from alleged unpaid wages. A notice had been sent about the conference last June 29, he testified.
A document from the state labor board was on Melvin’s kitchen counter, the detective testified.
The woman’s boyfriend identified Obioha as the gunman when he was shown a “six-pack” of photos just under three weeks after the shooting, another LAPD detective testified at that hearing.
Obioha — who has been jailed since his arrest 19 days after the killing — is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole. The prosecution had opted earlier not to seek the death penalty.
He is set to be sentenced Jan. 5 by Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry.
“There’s nothing to celebrate here,” the victim’s father, Bernard Melvin, said outside court. “I lost my daughter. A young man is going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Obioha’s attorney, Jamon Hicks, told reporters that he was “disappointed obviously” with the verdict and said that he believed the defense had done a “good job of showing that there was reasonable doubt in the case.”
“This is a (case of) he wasn’t the one and that someone else did this, someone murdered her in a terrible fashion, but they got the wrong guy … I’ll always think that they have the wrong person. Our theme was that this was a rush to judgment,” the defense lawyer said.
Obioha’s sister, Nkechi Howell, said she was “devastated but not surprised” by the verdict.
“I have to be hopeful that the truth will come out and justice will be served. I know my brother didn’t do this. Our whole family knows that he’s innocent. Someone killed Carrie Melvin, but it wasn’t my brother and we have known that the entirety of this trial.”
