Justin Smith was grasping for the gun that his pregnant girlfriend had pressed to her temple, he told a Philadelphia jury this week, when the weapon accidently went off, firing 12 shots in a matter of seconds — 11 of them into her head.
Smith, 28, took the stand at his trial for murder and related crimes in the death of Dianna Brice, 21, in Southwest Philadelphia and said the shooting was an accident.
On Friday, a jury rejected Smith’s account and convicted him of first and third-degree murder for the 2021 death of Brice and her unborn child. Smith was also convicted of abuse of a corpse, arson, and related crimes after he admitted to committing those acts to cover up the killing.
Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Kyriakakis sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
During closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney Lauren Crump cast doubt on Smith’s explanation of how his girlfriend died, saying it was impossible for that many shots to have fired into a concentrated area if the gun accidentally went off during a struggle over the weapon, as he suggested.
She pointed to other problems with Smith’s defense, urging jurors to reject his contention that the Glock handgun modified with a semi-automatic “switch” was Brice’s, not his.
And she dismissed Smith’s argument that he covered up the crime and fled Pennsylvania after the killing because he was scared, bidding jurors to recall his swift actions — setting his car on fire and disposing of Brice’s body in trash bags — before heading to Florida in an attempt to reach Cuba.
“That is not panic,” Crump said, “That is premeditation.”
Brice, 21, of Upper Darby, was 14 weeks pregnant with Smith’s child when she died on March 30, 2021, Lindsay Simon, chief medical examiner for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, testified during the trial.
Prosecutors said she was last seen with Smith that day driving from a Delaware County laundromat to Philadelphia, where the couple got into a volatile argument after Brice learned she had tested positive for herpes and accused her boyfriend of giving her the STI.
It was the last time Brice was seen alive.
Police discovered her body seven days later in a wooded area near 58th Street and Eastwick Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, covered in black trash bags and wrapped in a tan blanket.
She had been shot in the head 11 times at close range and struck once in her right shoulder. Simon, the medical examiner, said the shots would have almost certainty killed Brice instantaneously.
Philadelphia police quickly identified Smith as a suspect: Cell phone records from the day Brice died showed her phone traveling the same path as Smith’s phone — until 1:38 p.m., when the phone’s trail went dark, said Anthony Vega, a former Philadelphia police detective who testified at the trial as an cell site expert.
Police also found Smith’s dark gray Ford Fusion, burned to a blackened shell, near Florence Avenue and 59th Street, about a mile from where Brice’s body was discovered.
Investigators traced the vehicle to Brice’s makeshift gravesite, and to where it was found burned, using video footage from street surveillance cameras, Philadelphia police Detective Thorsten Lucke testified.
But the cameras did more than capture the Fusion’s path: it also showed Smith and an accomplice, Tylydia Garnett, wearing gloves and loading what appeared to be a large object into the back of a Hyundai, which police traced to the same locations and to a gas station where its driver purchased a cannister of fuel used to set the Fusion ablaze, prosecutors said.
While detectives soon suspected Smith was involved, he wasn’t arrested until 2025, when Atlanta police took him into custody after he gave an officer a fake name during a routine traffic stop and fled.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia police arrested his accomplice, Garnett, in April 2021. She pleaded guilty to arson, abuse of a corpse, and related crimes, and was sentenced to 11 ½ to 23 months.
This week, Garnett, 27, told jurors at Smith’s murder trial that he had confessed to her that he shot Brice.
She testified that she had helped him flee to Florida before he moved to Georgia, though Smith’s attorney, Samuel Stretton, suggested the woman had inflated details of her story to earn a more lenient sentence.
When Smith testified, he told jurors Brice’s death was a tragic, shocking accident.
During their argument in the car, he said, the exchange escalated as he drove. He denied cheating on her, but he said Brice became agitated and held a gun to his head before turning the weapon on herself.
“I tried to hurry up and pull it from her,” he testified. Instead, he said, “It went off, and she died.”
In fear for what might happen to him, Smith said he hatched a plot to dispose of her body and burn the car with the gun still inside it. The gun was never found, prosecutors said.
“Why didn’t you come to your senses and call for help?” Stretton, his attorney, asked.
“I just felt like this wasn’t going to go my way,” Smith said.
Following the jury’s verdict, Brice’s family, who had lined three rows of the courtroom during the three-day trial, expressed relief for the guilty verdict.