Testimony began Tuesday in the sanity phase of the case against Ramy Hany Mounir Fahim, the 30-year-old Irvine man who admitted fatally stabbing two Anaheim men inside an apartment during an April 2022 attack. Fahim has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and jurors now must decide whether he was legally insane when the killings happened.
Fahim pleaded guilty on April 7 to two counts of murder with special circumstance allegations of multiple victims and lying in wait, and he also admitted a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a deadly weapon. If jurors find he was legally insane at the time of the killings, he would be sent to a state hospital until he is restored to sanity. If he is found to have been sane, he will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Police were called about 6:30 a.m. on April 19, 2022, to an apartment at 2100 E. Katella Ave. in Anaheim for an assault in progress. Officers found the bodies of 23-year-old Griffin Robert Cuomo and 23-year-old Jonathan Andrew Bahm, along with Fahim, who had a minor injury. He was treated at a hospital and then questioned by detectives before being booked on suspicion of murder.
The defense has the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that Fahim was criminally insane, a legal standard that puts the focus squarely on his mental state rather than the brutality of the killings. Marlin Stapleton Jr., Fahim’s attorney, has said his client battled schizophrenia for years, had been hearing voices since he was 10 and was diagnosed in September 2018. Stapleton also said Fahim was involuntarily hospitalized in Florida in March 2021 after bizarre threats toward his parents and received anti-psychotic drugs there.
Stapleton called the deaths a horrible tragedy and said Fahim moved to Orange County in 2021 when his mother used her connections to get him a job there. He also said Fahim received a new anti-psychotic drug while being treated in Orange County about a month before the killings. Cuomo and Bahm were pals at Chapman University and roommates after graduation, and Fahim and Cuomo worked together at a wealth management office in Newport Beach.
The sanity phase is the final fork in the case: a finding of insanity would send Fahim to a state hospital, while a finding that he was sane would end with a sentence of life without parole. For the families of the two Chapman friends, the question now is not whether he killed them — he has already admitted that — but whether the law will treat what happened next as the act of a man who knew what he was doing.
