According to the police officials, a 24-year-old man was convicted of first-degree murder because he brutally beat his girlfriend in a jealous rage, taunted the dying woman in a recording, left her for hours and only sought medical attention after he attended an unrelated court hearing. According to the court documents, the 24-year-old man asked that he be immediately sentenced for killing his 22-year-old girlfriend. The judge handed down a life term and the prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.
According to the court documents, Nicholas Forman got upset when the victim, Sabrina Harooni, got a text from an ex-boyfriend. The couple was taking an Uber home from a restaurant.
Forman beat the woman so badly that she sustained injuries including bleeding in her brain. He recorded the dying woman on his cellphone and taunted her as she passed. Instead of getting help for the badly injured woman, he went to a court hearing the next morning for drug charges. According to authorities, he claimed to return to find Harooni unresponsive, then got another Uber driver to bring them to the hospital.
At trial, he admitted that he killed Harooni, but that admission was part of an unsuccessful bid to argue that the killing was unintentional. The defense tried to claim the evidence only supported a conviction on third-degree murder — which carries, of course, a significantly lesser sentence.
