Brianna Kupfer’s alleged killer is on trial for her murder two years after the brutal stabbing of the 24-year-old UCLA student.
Kupfer, an architectural graduate student, was working alone at Croft House, a boutique furniture store in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park, Jan. 13, 2022, when Shawn Laval Smith allegedly entered the store and stabbed her dozens of times.
“The evidence will demonstrate that the defendant attacked Brianna with such force, such determination, with such frequent and numerous swings of this knife that he bent the steel blade,” Habib Balian, a deputy district attorney, said in the prosecution’s opening statement. “Brianna Kupfer was stabbed to death 26 times.”
Smith, who has a long criminal history, was arrested six days after Kupfer’s murder.
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Shawn Laval Smith is on trial for allegedly stabbing Brianna Kupfer to death in 2022. (KTTV)
“This is a brutal murder,” Nathan Hochman, who is running against LA County District Attorney George Gascon, told Fox News Monday.
“Shawn Laval Smith, according to the prosecution’s opening statement, was a transient who had over a decade-long criminal history,” Hochman added. “Investigators found Smith’s knife with his DNA on it, there’s video of him at the store and he actually made an audio recording where you could hear on the audio tape that she is pleading with him, that she can actually help him.”
“With her last breathing words, she’s telling him: ‘I can help you, I can help you, I can help you.’ And he’s telling her, ‘It’s over, b—-, it’s over,'” Balian said in the courtroom.
He added “the defendant recorded himself talking about his most vile and disgusting and grotesque thoughts about women.”
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Brianna Kupfer, 24, was stabbed to death in 2022. (Linkedin)
Hochman added that Smith “should have never have been on the streets that day. He had a rap sheet going back a decade, and if the prosecutors at the time had been doing their job, and he had been arrested on his outstanding warrants, he would not have been in the furniture store that day to kill Brianna Kupfer.”
Smith went to six other stores before finding Kupfer, trying to find a woman working alone, prosecutors said, according to FOX 11.
“He wanted to kill women,” Balian said in court.
Kupfer’s parents called her an “angel.” (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
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If convicted, Smith could face life without the possibility of parole.
“It’s interesting because you sit here and you think, ‘What am I going to say about her?’ and you want to be authentic, and you want to be real. And all those things never sound real when you say that she was an angel and she was perfect, right?” Kupfer’s father, Todd Kupfer, told FOX 11 last week ahead of the trial.
“It sort of doesn’t sound true, but, in fact, it pretty much was.”
