Conoray Lawantara is 19 years old and until recently was an altar boy at Portsmouth Abbey, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island that costs 80.000 dollars annually. On Sunday night, in a Beverly Hills alley, something drove him to plunge a 3,9-inch knife again and again into the body of Vanik Voskanyan, a 40-year-old man who was merely checking some trash cans.
Judge Keith Schwartz had no doubts when describing the scene: he said Lawantara stabbed him “repeatedly, as if in a horror movie”. The defense claims that Voskanyan grabbed him by the neck, bit one of his fingers, and wounded him in the abdomen before the young man drew the weapon he had concealed. The judge responded that there was no reason for any contact to have occurred: “he did not approach him, he was not violent, he was minding his own business”.
Neighbors of exclusive North Palm Drive, where homes exceed 2 million dollars, spoke of puddles of blood throughout the alley and likened the scene to an episode of CSI. Voskanyan died shortly afterward at a hospital. Lawantara, an Indonesian citizen, pleaded not guilty and was given 2 million dollars bail and ordered to surrender his passport.
