Man convicted for stabbing death of UCLA grad student at furniture store

By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH

After just over an hour of deliberations, a downtown Los Angeles jury on Tuesday convicted a transient of first-degree murder for stabbing a female UCLA graduate student 46 times in an audio-recorded attack at a Hancock Park boutique furniture store.

Shawn Laval Smith, now 34, was found guilty of the Jan. 13, 2022, attack on Brianna Kupfer, who was working alone inside the Croft House on the 300 block of North La Brea Avenue, near Beverly Boulevard.

Jurors also found true a special circumstance allegation of murder while lying in wait, along with an allegation that the defendant used a knife during the commission of the crime.

The trial is set to move into its sanity phase, which will be heard starting Oct. 2 by Superior Court Judge Mildred Escobedo.

Smith faces a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if the judge determines he was sane at the time of the crime. Smith — who pleaded both not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity — had waived a jury trial for the sanity phase.

“I would say it’s (an) overwhelming sense of relief,” the victim’s father, Todd Kupfer, said shortly after the jury’s verdict. “This has obviously been a brutal couple of weeks for us … The fact that we cried the entire time — that’s what it was like.”

He called it “gut-wrenching to sit there and watch the end of your daughter’s life.”

“At the end of the day, this got a lot of attention because it was basically good vs. evil — and something very evil that happened to somebody very, very good,” the young woman’s father said.

With her voice cracking, the woman’s mother, Lori Kupfer, told reporters, “Justice will never be served because our daughter’s not alive. But the D.A. did a wonderful job, and the jury really listened to the evidence that they heard, and we are very happy that they understood the law and made the correct decision. As I said, it’s not just, but it will protect the public, which is what I think it was meant to do.”

She said the phone call she received to let the family know what had happened to their daughter was something that they never expected.

“And I think that’s what gets people. She was doing all the right things,” the victim’s mother said.

In his closing argument Monday, Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian described Smith as a man who “hates women,” and went from business to business while “hunting for a woman alone,” and then posed as a customer when he found Kupfer working on her own inside the store.

“Her guard was down,” the prosecutor said of the 24-year-old victim. “He was lying in wait for his perfect target … She had no idea what he plans to do to her.”

On a digital audio recorder that was left behind at the scene and was still running when police arrived, the woman’s assailant can be heard saying that he was “not gonna hurt her,” and ordering her to “just get down on the floor.” Then the woman can be heard screaming, and her assailant subsequently tells her, “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over, bitch.”

Smith left the young woman bleeding on the ground, left through a back door of the business and calmly walked down an alley before disappearing between two apartment buildings, Balian told jurors.

In his haste to leave the bloody crime scene, the defendant left behind a knife with a blade that was bent, as well as a knife sheath and the audio recorder — all of which contained his DNA, the prosecutor said.

In a recording that was made about 2 1/2 weeks earlier and was subsequently found on the recorder, Smith allegedly can be heard saying, “I do not like bitches,” and vowing to “destroy everything.”

Defense attorney Robert Haberer countered that the recording from December 2021 did not prove there was a motive to commit murder by the man he described as a “homeless drifter” roaming at commercial businesses to talk with people behind the counter.

Smith’s lawyer called the recording a “mildly incoherent rant laced with profanities” and “not exactly some sort of manifesto” or “smoking gun” for a “ghastly murder 2 1/2 weeks later.”

“The fact that he was upset about women is not a red flag,” Haberer told jurors about the older recording, describing it as a “tantrum to himself” in which he was “blowing off steam.”

Smith’s attorney argued that it would take a “Grand Canyon leap of logic” to conclude from the recording about 2 1/2 weeks before the slaying that the man he repeatedly referred to as “the suspect” intended then to kill someone.

“The decision to attack Brianna Kupfer happened in an instant. … This was not planned in any way,” the defense lawyer said.

Haberer suggested that the assailant had been flirting with the victim and that he subsequently told her to put a phone down because he may have sensed she was reaching out for help.

The defense lawyer said that the attack was “not thought out with reason and logic,” and that it would be “ludicrous” to suggest that there was reflective contemplation beforehand.

“This was not an ambush. This was an attack in plain sight — the opposite of what an ambush is,” Haberer said in his closing argument.

The defense attorney said he wondered whether jurors would even think that Smith was the assailant, and noted at another point in his closing argument that jurors could consider the lesser offense of second-degree murder.

Smith’s attorney questioned why the case had “stirred up more emotion” than other murder cases in Los Angeles County, noting that there was a television camera in the courtroom, and told jurors to look at two large photos of Kupfer, who was white, and his client, who is Black, and see what they notice.

The judge twice sustained the prosecution’s objection to that portion of the defense’s argument.

In his rebuttal argument, the prosecutor questioned why Smith’s attorney was “talking about race.”

“This is not about race. Brianna Kupfer could have been Black, white, Hispanic, anything,” Balian said. “It doesn’t change what he did.”

The prosecutor added, “He had a plan to find and kill a woman … He hunted her down … made a surprise attack on her.”

Balian — who argued that there was “overwhelming evidence” of premeditation — urged the panel to convict Smith of the most serious charge of first-degree murder and the special circumstance allegation, as well as the knife allegation.

“Oh, it’s him,” the prosecutor said of the defense attorney’s remark questioning whether the assailant was actually Smith.

The woman’s body was found on the floor by a woman who came into the store with her boyfriend and then rushed outside to call 911.

Kupfer was pronounced dead in the store.

Smith — who gave police a fake name — was taken into custody six days later after a Pasadena resident called police to report a sighting of the defendant following an offer of a reward, according to the prosecutor.

The defendant has remained behind bars since his arrest.

The judge revoked Smith’s right to act as his own attorney during the trial following a contentious hearing in June 2023 in which he directed profanities at the judge during his first appearance before her and abruptly rose from his seat in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

A day after Smith was arrested in Kupfer’s killing, dozens of people gathered outside the furniture store for a vigil to pay tribute to the young woman’s life and decry the senselessness of her death.

“Bri was the brightest part of anyone’s day who got to interact with her,” Alex Segal, a co-owner of the Croft House furniture store, said then. “She was smart and capable and intelligent. Kind and friendly and just an incredibly driven person.”

Segal said the community is asking “why is this happening,” but said “I don’t know that there … will ever be a sufficient answer to that question.”