A 30-year-old Irvine man has pleaded guilty to ambushing two Chapman University alumni and stabbing them to death at their apartment near Angel Stadium in 2022, leaving an Orange County Superior Court jury to decide if he was insane at the time of the killings.
Ramy Fahim admitted Tuesday, April 7, to two counts of murder with special-circumstances enhancements for lying in wait and committing a murder to avoid arrest, according to Orange County Superior Court records.
That still leaves the sanity phase of his trial, which will determine whether Fahim — who previously pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity — faces up to life in prison without parole or being sent to a state hospital for treatment.
Fahim worked at the office of a wealth-management firm in Newport Beach with one of the victims, Griffin Robert Cuomo, 23. The other victim — Jonathan Andrew Bahm, also 23 — had no prior connection to Fahim, police previously said.
Cuomo and Bahm were roommates who graduated from Chapman University less than a year before the stabbings April 19, 2022.
Cuomo was a marketing and media assistant at Pence Wealth Management, where Fahim also worked. Those who knew him during his time at Chapman’s School of Communications remembered Cuomo as a thoughtful and appreciative student with an uplifting personality who offered frequent words of encouragement in online classes during the pandemic.
Bahm, a computer-science major during his time at Chapman, was a member of the Cybersmart Panthers GCI team, a student-led group that combated hacking, phishing and other cybercrimes. He also worked as an intern for game-design studios.
Fahim’s motive for the killing was not clear.
But a lawsuit filed by Cuomo’s mother, against the wealth-management business, alleged that Fahim suffered from a lifelong mental illness that caused him “serious difficulty in refraining from violent conduct” and led him to turn his anger on Cuomo and other co-workers.
The lawsuit alleged that Fahim was given the “green light” to “harass, intimidate and threaten” employees at Pence Wealth Management because his mother, who was serving at the time as a minister with the Egyptian government, was friends with the firm’s leaders.
Jury selection for the sanity phase of Fahim’s trial is underway at the Santa Ana courthouse.
