Prosecutors say suspect in murder of UCLA student Brianna Kupfer captured brutal stabbing

The alleged killer of Brianna Kupfer is on trial for the murder, two years after the brutal stabbing of the 24-year-old UCLA student.

Kupfer, a graduate architecture student, was working alone at Croft House, a furniture boutique in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park, on January 13, 2022, when Shawn Laval Smith allegedly entered the store and stabbed her dozens of times.

“The evidence will show that the defendant attacked Brianna with such force, such determination, with such frequent and numerous blows with 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 the alleged stabbing death of Brianna Kupfer in 2022. (KTTV)

“This is a brutal murder,” Nathan Hochman, who is running against Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, told Fox News on Monday.

“Shawn Laval Smith, according to the prosecutor’s opening statement, was a homeless man with a criminal history that spanned over a decade,” Hochman added. “Detectives found Smith’s knife with his DNA on it, there’s video of him in the store, and he even made an audio recording where you could hear on the audiotape that she was pleading with him, that she could actually help him.”

“Her last words are she says to him, ‘I can help you, I can help you, I can help you.’ And he says to her, ‘It’s over, b—-, it’s over,'” Balian said in court.

He added that “the suspect recorded himself speaking about his most despicable, 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 never have been on the street that day. He had a rap sheet going back 10 years, and if the prosecutors had done their job back then, and he had been arrested on his outstanding warrants, he would not have been in the furniture store that day killing Brianna Kupfer.”

Prosecutors say Smith went to six other stores before finding Kupfer, and he tried to find a woman working alone, FOX 11 reported.

“He wanted to kill women,” Balian told the court.

Kupfer’s parents called her an “angel.” (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

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If Smith is found guilty, he could face life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“It’s interesting because you’re sitting here and you’re like, ‘What am I going to say about her?’ and you want to be authentic, and you want to be real. And all of those things never sound real when you say she was an angel and she was perfect, right?” Kupfer’s father, Todd Kupfer, told FOX 11 last week ahead of the trial.

“It may not sound true, but it actually was.”