A 34-year-old man chased a teenage girl into the street and shot her in the top of the head, leaving her to die outside her Long Beach home, a prosecutor told a jury during closing arguments of the man’s trial Wednesday, March 26.
Delivering his closing argument in Long Beach Superior Court a year to the date after the shooting that killed Briana Soto, Los Angeles County prosecutor Robert Song argued there was overwhelming evidence tying Troy Lamar Fox to her killing and a separate shooting in which four teenagers in a car escaped injury less than a month later.
A man the prosecutor identified as Fox was seen walking in the neighborhood on surveillance video shortly before the 8:20 p.m. shooting, then briefly running after the time of the shooting.
But Fox’s attorney, Joe Gibbons, said prosecutors had not done enough to prove the person in the video was Fox.
“This case turns on one simple issue and that’s the identity of the killer,” Gibbons told the jury. “The people have not shown any evidence whatsoever that Troy Fox is the man depicted in any of these videos.”
Jurors were handed the case about 3 p.m. Wednesday and are tasked with deciding whether Fox is guilty of murder and four counts of attempted murder along with special circumstance allegations for all charges.
Soto had finished a shift at McDonald’s about 8 p.m. on March 26, 2024, and was walking home in the area of 11th Street and Lewis Avenue when Fox, for unknown reasons, fired four shots at her, Song told the jury.
The two had crossed paths minutes earlier at 10th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, but did not interact as they were walking in different directions, Song said. But they crossed a second time as Soto neared her home. She was on the phone with her boyfriend when Fox emerged.
The shooting was not captured on surveillance video, but one video captured the sound of four gunshots and two screams, the second of which occurred right as the fourth and final gunshot was fired.
The video was played in court Wednesday during Song’s initial closing argument.
Some family members of Soto in attendance loudly wept after hearing the gunshots and screams, with some needing to be escorted out of the courtroom.
Police have said Soto was just steps from her home when she was shot.
“The victim is being chased from the sidewalk to the street,” Song said. “She is ducking to avoid being shot. That is why it enters from the top of her head and goes down.”
Police arrived and found Soto, a high school senior, in the middle of the street. She died days later at a hospital.
Gibbons noted there was no evidence of any verbal exchange between Fox and Soto before the shots were fired, further indicating Fox was not there that night.
One of the four shell casings found at the scene had Fox’s DNA on it, Song said.
No motive for the shooting had been laid out, but Song told the jury he didn’t need to prove a motive, only that the evidence showed Fox fired the shots.
The investigation was aided by Fox’s then-girlfriend, who was arrested nearly six months after Soto’s killing on a weapons charge. While in an interrogation room, she identified Fox in surveillance videos by his shoes and the way he walked. She told detectives that Fox sometimes stayed with her in the 1100 block of Lime Avenue, a few blocks from the shooting scene, and that he sometimes used her car, a dark-colored Nissan sedan.
That car was seen on surveillance video in a parking lot near 14th Street and Pine Avenue in the early morning, April 9, when a man, identified by Song as Fox, pulled a rifle and fired 13 rounds at another sedan that had arrived and then fled. Four teenagers in that sedan escaped injury and the driver crashed the car about a block east of the shooting.
Gibbons, however, attempted to discredit the ex-girlfriend’s interview with detectives, noting she was in custody and stressed.
“If you don’t have (the ex-girlfriend), you have nothing in this case,” Gibbons said.
Jurors will continue deliberating Thursday morning.