A Philadelphia man accused of killing a woman inside her Upper Darby home in May 2022 was acquitted on all charges Friday following a jury trial before Common Pleas Court Judge Margaret Amoroso this week.<\/p>\n
Abdul Rafi Muhsin, 23, of the 1900 block of Elston Street, had been charged with murder in the first and third degree, as well as carrying a firearm without a license. He was arrested in Philadelphia in October 2022, five months after fleeing from the shooting scene inside a home on the 7000 block of Clinton Road in Upper Darby.<\/p>\n
The jury deliberated for four hours before returning a verdict.<\/p>\n
Officers and paramedics were called to the victim\u2019s address about 2:23 a.m. on May 19 for a possible unconscious person with a stab wound to the throat.<\/p>\n
Jenny Lentz, 40, was found inside at the bottom of a stairwell, suffering from a wound at the base of her throat that was later determined to be a gunshot wound. She was declared dead at the scene.<\/p>\n
Jurors heard from numerous witnesses at trial this week, including the defendant.<\/p>\n
Much of the evidence was not in dispute between Deputy District Attorney Geoff Paine and defense counsel Kevin O\u2019Neill, including a timeline of events as laid out by applications on the victim\u2019s phone and video evidence.<\/p>\n
What was in question was how Lentz came to have been shot in her neck and what became of the firearm that caused that wound.<\/p>\n
According to testimony at trial, Lentz was working as a prostitute out of her family home in Upper Darby. Her father said neither he nor her mother liked it, but it was better than her doing it out on the street, where she would be in more danger.<\/p>\n
A couple of months before she was shot, he said a client had pulled a gun on Lentz. The father ran up from his basement room and defused the situation, taking the magazine out of the gun and throwing the firearm outside, but Lentz did not want to report the incident to police.<\/p>\n
Father testifies<\/p>\n
The father also testified that Lentz was afraid of guns and never owned or used one. He said there were no guns in the house.<\/p>\n
The father said he installed a panic button in Lentz\u2019s room that would ring a bell in the basement if she was in trouble and that a security camera had been installed outside.<\/p>\n
Lentz never rang that bell the night she was killed, her father said. He said he did hear screaming after she was shot and ran upstairs with a crowbar, which arriving officers documented.<\/p>\n
The camera showed Muhsin arriving to the row home at 1:47 a.m. and being let in by Lentz. He is wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants in that video.<\/p>\n
At 2:19 a.m., Muhsin can be seen flying out the door as Lentz\u2019s mother wails in the background.<\/p>\n
The mother was not able to testify for medical reasons, but had given several recorded statements to investigators and testified at a preliminary hearing, which were played for the jury.<\/p>\n
In the first of those statements, she tells Upper Darby Detective Kevin Finnegan that she saw a man later identified as Muhsin put his right hand to Lentz\u2019s throat at the top of the stairs and then run out the door before Lentz grabbed her neck and tumbled down the stairs.<\/p>\n
She initially believed Muhsin had stabbed her with a knife, though she did not see it. Even after it became apparent Lentz had been shot, the mother said in subsequent interviews that she had not heard a gunshot and did not see a firearm.<\/p>\n
At the preliminary hearing, the mother said she woke up about 2 a.m. to use the bathroom, then returned to her bed. She said she heard a scuffle in her daughter\u2019s bedroom about 10 minutes later and could hear her daughter and another man talking in raised voices, but could not make out any words.<\/p>\n
The mother said she went to investigate, finding the door to her daughter\u2019s room partially open, and saw Lentz \u201cfussing\u201d with a man in her room that she identified as Muhsin.<\/p>\n
Lentz told her mother to go back to bed, but she stayed in the doorway. Eventually, she said her daughter exited the bedroom and stood against a hallway wall. The mother was also standing in the hallway as they both waited for Muhsin to leave, she said.<\/p>\n
Instead, she said Muhsin came charging out of her daughter\u2019s room and pinned her against the wall, then apparently shot her in the neck.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe came at her like a crazy person,\u201d she said. \u201c(He) put the gun against her neck and shot it, and she stood there against the wall holding her throat and put her finger in the hole. And then he flew down the steps and left with me and my daughter, dying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jurors also heard from Delaware County Medical Examiner Dr. Albert Chu, who said the gun had to have been within about six inches of Lentz, evidenced by soot and gunpowder stippling on her skin, as well as a DNA expert who matched Muhsin\u2019s DNA to one of two condoms found in a trashcan in Lentz\u2019s room.<\/p>\n
A Lyft driver also testified that he picked Muhsin up from the Clinton Road location that night. He said he had been waiting a couple of minutes when Muhsin jumped in his car and said, \u201cgo, go go!\u201d and then told him he had just been raped.<\/p>\n
When the Lyft driver asked if he should call police, Muhsin said not to.<\/p>\n
Defendant on stand<\/p>\n
CashApp data and texts indicated Muhsin had gone to Lentz\u2019s home that night for a date. Lentz agreed to provide him money for a Lyft to her address, which he promised to pay her back for in cash. She sent him $25 prior to his arrival, and another $30 in two transactions after, the last of which was at 2:08 a.m. for a Lyft home.<\/p>\n
Police were able to identify Muhsin as a suspect from this information and served a search warrant at the house where he was staying, recovering two fired cartridge casings. Muhsin was not there at the time and remained on the lam until police got a tip about his location in October 2022.<\/p>\n
In his own testimony, Muhsin acknowledged that he had gone to the Clinton Road home that night for oral sex. He said he had previously paid Lentz $150 for oral without a condom. She had quoted him in texts that her rate was $240 an hour plus $50 for extras.<\/p>\n
Muhsin said because he was not there for an hour that he gave her $100 plus $60 to cover what she was fronting him for Lyfts through CashApp.<\/p>\n
But he said that she became upset with that amount of money, went into a closet and retrieved a semi-automatic pistol, which she pointed at his chest.<\/p>\n
Muhsin claimed he tried to knock the gun out of her hand and, when that didn\u2019t work, pushed her into the wall, where the gun must have come up and discharged into her chest. He fled immediately afterward.<\/p>\n
Closing arguments<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill argued in closing that the commonwealth had failed to make out either the requisite intent for first-degree murder or the malice required for third-degree murder.<\/p>\n
He noted the mother was not available to be cross-examined and that the father had already admitted to being unwilling to cooperate with police in the earlier gun-related issue with a client.<\/p>\n
The mother also had claimed Muhsin raised his right hand toward her daughter, O\u2019Neill said, though the gunshot wound was on the right side of her neck, not the left, and the bullet traveled right to left across her body.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill theorized it was not unreasonable to assume that Lentz, operating a cash business out of her home, would have a firearm for self-protection and that her parents hid it either before police arrived that night or before any kind of search of the house could take place, though no search apparently ever did, aside from some photographs being taken.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill added that there was no evidence his client had a gun that night from either of the videos and that he had run from police and not turned himself in because he was terrified.<\/p>\n
He said that if the jury believed his client was acting in self-defense from Lentz pulling a gun on him and used non-lethal force to try to push Lentz away because he was afraid for his life, he must be found not guilty of murder.<\/p>\n
Paine said that in the four statements Lentz\u2019s mother had given, she never wavered in what she saw: Muhsin raising his right hand and putting it to Lentz\u2019s neck, then running down the stairs as Lentz tried to stem the blood coming from a hole in her throat.<\/p>\n
Paine noted that hole was only slightly off to the right, but was more or less in the center of her throat, not way off to the side as O\u2019Neill had pantomimed. He also pointed out that the area at the top of the steps where she was shot is something of a box shape and that Lentz could have turned her body in a way that matched the trajectory of the bullet with a right-handed shooter.<\/p>\n
It was a lot easier to believe that then Lentz having her own hand folded back up toward her and discharging a gun into herself, Paine added.<\/p>\n
Even less believable was that the parents, both on calls to 911 as they frantically told a dispatcher they needed help and tried to stem the blood flow from Lentz with a towel, were also busy collecting a fired cartridge casing and handgun to hide from police in the few minutes before officers arrived.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill had questioned whether Muhsin told the Lyft driver he had been \u201craped\u201d or \u201crobbed,\u201d but Paine said the driver clearly stated Muhsin said \u201craped.\u201d Providing that story and then remaining on the lam for months afterward demonstrated consciousness of guilty, Paine said.<\/p>\n
Paine also argued that the intent to kill can be formed in a second. He did not believe Muhsin went over there that night with the intent to kill Lentz, but he did bring a gun with him, Paine said. That you could not tell as much from the video meant nothing, he said, before pulling out a prop handgun he had hidden in the waistband of his suit the entire morning.<\/p>\n
It also made little sense for Lentz, who had previously performed the same service for Muhsin for the same amount of money, to suddenly become angry and pull out a gun, Paine said. While Paine did not offer much in what he believed might have happened that night, he did note this was a cash business and indicated it might have been an attempted robbery on Muhsin\u2019s part.<\/p>\n
Muhsin made objections or outbursts during a couple of points in Paine\u2019s arguments and was warned to be quiet or be removed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Philadelphia man accused of killing a woman inside her Upper Darby home in May 2022 was acquitted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[46,212,182,139,28,210,147,149,148,150],"class_list":["post-183164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-upper-darby","tag-courts","tag-delaware-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-dtd","tag-upper-darby","tag-upper-darby-headlines","tag-upper-darby-news","tag-upper-darby-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}