Homeless California man who stabbed UCLA student to death was 'hunting for a woman alone' before he attacked: prosecutors

The homeless man who slaughtered UCLA student Brianna Kupfer in 2022 by stabbing her 46 times and recording audio of the horrifying moment was "hunting for a woman alone" on the day Kupfer was killed, prosecutors said. 

The jury pronounced Shawn Laval Smith, who possesses a long rap sheet, guilty of murder after just one hour of deliberation Tuesday in Los Angeles agreeing with prosecutors that he attacked Kupfer with a knife while he was “lying in wait” for any woman to come along, the New York Post reported.

LA County Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian compared Smith to the Hannibal Lecter film character, a sadist who was excited by the notion of inflicting violence upon women.

Smith, 34, was “hunting for a woman alone” when he found 24-year-old Kupfer at work in a furniture store, according to Los Angeles County district attorneys. As he let loose on the woman with a filet knife, he documented the attack on an audio recorder which he left, along with the blood-covered and DNA-smeared knife, at the scene of the crime.

Smith used his recording device about a month before his violent outburst to ramble about how he wanted to kill women, according to evidence presented at the trial. “This man hated women,” Bailan said in his closing argument, according to NBC LA. “It’s easier probably to sleep at night to think something is wrong with him rather than face the truth that this man was on a crusade to hunt, to destroy and to kill for the mere fact that she was female.”

Defense attorney Robert Haberer tried to lessen the murder conviction by suggesting Smith was too crazy to plan such a crime. “It sounds like he was blowing off steam, probably because he was pissed off about something in that moment. Who the hell knows what it was?” ABC 7 quoted him as saying.

Kupfer had been a graduate student studying architecture. Smith could be sentenced to life in prison without parole but a judge must first assess whether Smith was sane when he attacked Kupfer.