The case
Brianna Kupfer was twenty-four, a UCLA graduate student in architectural design, and worked as a consultant at Croft House, a furniture shop on North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. On January 13, 2022, she was minding the store alone. Cameras along the block had been recording a masked man drifting from storefront to storefront all morning.
At about 1:36 that afternoon Brianna texted her manager that a customer in the shop was giving her bad vibes. The man was Shawn Laval Smith, who was homeless and had piled up more than a dozen arrests in three states, with a California warrant out for him. He left forty-six wounds on her, twenty-six of them stab wounds, and walked out through the alley at the back. A customer found her about twenty minutes after that text. Detectives released the surveillance images, a reward was posted, and a tip led officers to Smith in Pasadena on January 19.
A Los Angeles jury convicted Smith of first-degree murder with special circumstances on September 10, 2024. At sentencing a judge rejected his insanity claim after hearing jail calls in which he talked about faking it. He was sentenced in October 2024 to life without the possibility of parole. California’s Second District Court of Appeal upheld the conviction on September 2, 2026.
Case photographs
Where it happened
North La Brea Avenue, where Brianna Kupfer was working alone