The murder trial of a 17-year-old Poly High School student opened today with emotional testimony from her mother, who said she heard the gunshots that killed her daughter and went outside to find her bleeding in the street just steps from their Cambodia Town home.
Briana Soto had just gotten off her job at McDonald’s and was walking home when she was fatally shot near the intersection of 11th Street and Lewis Avenue at about 8:22 p.m. on March 26, prosecutors said.
As the trial began, Ricardo Choza, Soto’s boyfriend testified that he was on the phone with her that day when he heard “a scream, then a pop noise.”
Security camera video shows Soto walking eastbound along 11th Street shortly before she goes out of frame a few moments before the shooting. A person wearing a hoodie then runs the opposite direction down the same sidewalk.
During the trial, prosecutors will attempt to prove the hooded person on that video was 34-year-old Troy Lamar Fox, who was charged with Soto’s murder. He’s also facing four counts of attempted murder for a separate shooting two weeks later.
None of the evidence presented Wednesday hinted at a potential motive for Soto’s killing, and police said previously that it didn’t appear Fox had any prior relationship with Soto or any interaction with her before the shooting.
Fox’s attorney, Joseph Gibbons, told jurors that the prosecution’s evidence identifying his client as the shooter is “not convincing.”
Prosecutors, for their part, alleged that DNA collected from a bullet casing at the murder scene returned as a match for Fox.
They also tried to track the suspected shooter’s movements by collecting more video footage, but they lost track of the suspected shooter on video near 11th Street and Lime Avenue, where prosecutors say Fox’s girlfriend, Tyrisha Hawkins, lived at the time.
In a taped interview with detectives in September, Hawkins said the man in the surveillance videos matched Fox’s walk and had on black, white and red Nike Jordan 11s, which Fox also owned at the time.
Hawkins attempted to walk back that identification at a preliminary hearing last October and said she gave detectives that answer to appease them at the end of a roughly two-hour interrogation.
Hawkins also testified that Fox had access to her Nissan, which prosecutors allege Fox used to carry out a separate shooting on Pine Avenue just north of West Anaheim Street early in the morning on April 9 when Fox allegedly fired at, but missed, four teenagers as they drove away.
At the time of both shootings, Fox had a warrant out for his arrest dating back to November 2023, when he allegedly violated the terms of his conditional release related to a conviction of illegal weapons possession, police said.
His history of convictions dates back to 2013 when he accepted a plea deal on one felony count of making criminal threats in Antelope Valley.
Since then, Fox has also served time for grand theft in 2015 and 2017, felony burglary and grand theft in 2018, commercial burglary in 2019 and illegal possession of a firearm in 2023.
If convicted of the latest charges, he would face life in prison, prosecutors said.