A 34-year-old man was convicted by jury Friday, March 28, in the fatal, unprovoked shooting of a 17-year-old girl as she walked home from work in Long Beach last year, authorities said.
After deliberating for more than a day, Long Beach Superior Court jurors found Troy Lamar Fox of Long Beach guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting of high school senior Briana Soto and of four counts of attempted murder in a separate shooting more than two weeks later in which four teenagers escaped injury, prosecutor Robert Song said.
Fox was also convicted of two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm, Song said.
During his closing argument Wednesday, Song said it may never be known why Fox fired four shots at Soto, including one to the top of her head as she ducked down in the street, while she was just steps from her home near 11th Street and Lewis Avenue in Cambodia Town on March 26, 2024.
Soto had just gotten off work at McDonald’s at 8 p.m. and was walking home at night when Fox emerged about 8:22 p.m., Song said.
The two had crossed minutes earlier near 10th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, but did not interact and were walking in different directions, surveillance video shows.
Soto was found in the street and was hospitalized. She died days later.
One home security camera showed Soto walking in one direction while on the phone, then less than a minute later, a man who prosecutors identified as Fox running in the opposite direction. Police believed he then walked to the apartment of his then-girlfriend, who lived in the 1100 block of Lime Avenue, just blocks from the shooting scene.
Another video didn’t capture the shooting, but did capture the sound of four gunshots and two screams.
“We know she was alive because that last scream coincides with the very last gunshot,” Song said during his closing argument.
Investigators found four shell casings at the scene, one of which was found to have Fox’s DNA on it, Song said.
Months after the shooting, police released surveillance video of the suspect walking in the neighborhood prior to Soto’s shooting while asking for the public’s help in identifying the man, but investigators got a break in September after arresting his then-girlfriend on a weapons charge.
While in the interrogation room, she watched the surveillance video and said the man looked like Fox based on his walk and the shoes the man was wearing, which were black with white soles.
Fox’s attorney, Joe Gibbons, told the jury that prosecutors didn’t do enough to prove it was Fox in the videos and he also said the ex-girlfriend’s responses to the investigators in the interrogation room were not to be trusted, as she was stressed and trying to appease them.
“If you don’t have (her), then you have nothing in this case,” he said.
Surveillance video from the second shooting, on April 9 near 14th Street and Pine Avenue, also led investigators to the ex-girlfriend after learning she was the registered owner of the car containing the alleged shooter. She told investigators that Fox sometimes stayed with her and borrowed her car.
In that shooting, a second car pulled up and parked near Fox, but the driver fled as he grabbed a rifle and fired 13 rounds, hitting the car, but nobody inside, prosecutors said. The driver crashed about a block away.
Fox was scheduled to be sentenced on June 9, Song said.