Murderer of UCLA Graduate Student Sentenced to LWOP

An habitual criminal convicted of the 2022 stabbing murder of a 24-year-old graduate student has been sentenced life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) by a Los Angeles Judge. Steve Sorace of Fox News reports that the murderer, 34-year-old Shawn Laval Smith, presented an insanity defense at trial, which the judge rejected. A 2022 story in the New York Post on Smith’s arrest reports that Smith came to California from Charleston, South Carolina in 2019 while free on $50,000 bail on charges of shooting into a vehicle with a child inside during a road rage  incident. He already had convictions for illegal firearm possession and attacking a Charleston police officer.

In 2020 he was arrested for stealing items from a Home Deport but, under current state law, he faced no consequences. Co-ed Brianna Taylor was working alone at a high-end furniture store in LA’s exclusive Hancock Park neighborhood when Smith entered armed with a knife and forced to lay on the floor. He then stabbed Ms. Taylor forty-six times while she screamed for her life. After he killed her, he went out the back door leaving the knife. Security cameras and his DNA on the knife confirmed his guilt. Prosecutors told the court that Smith had visited six different stores looking for a woman alone to kill before he found Brianna Taylor. He was arrested in Pasadena six days after the murder.