The Miami Apartment Stabbing

This transcript is the episode script as written and fact-checked, timed to the recording. Timestamps are approximate within a sentence.

0:05 What's up guys, welcome back to CrimeTimeSnacks. On August 10, 2026, a thirty-year-old woman named Courtney Clenney stood up in a Miami courtroom and pleaded guilty to manslaughter with a deadly weapon. She was sentenced to six years, with credit for the time she had already served, and five years of probation after that. Here is the detail I cannot get past. She was arrested on August 10, 2022. Her sentencing was August 10, 2026. Four years, to the day, between the handcuffs and the plea.

0:32 This one is hard to talk about, and I want to say why up front. A man is dead. Christian Obumseli was twenty-seven years old. And this case is not a whodunit. Clenney called 911 herself and said she had stabbed him. What this case has always been about is why, and whether the law called it a crime. Both of these people accused the other of abuse, and the record has real evidence on both sides of that. So I am going to walk you through what is documented, what was alleged, and what the plea actually settled, which is less than you might think.

1:01 One more thing before we start. If any part of this sounds like your life, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233. That is in the notes for a reason. Let's unpack it. They lived in unit 2201 at One Paraiso Residences, a luxury high-rise on Northeast Seventh Avenue in the Edgewater neighborhood of Miami. They had moved in that January. The arrest warrant affidavit shows the day started peacefully. They were in the apartment playing with their two dogs. At about 1:15 in the afternoon, Obumseli left with the dogs to pick up Subway for the two of them.

1:33 While he was out, Clenney recorded and posted a live video to Instagram. Phone records show she called him just before she filmed it, and again just before he got back. At 4:32, he came back into the building with the dogs and the sandwiches. At 4:43, Clenney called her mother. That call was still going on, or had just ended, when the rest of it happened. Her mother told police that she heard her daughter calling Obumseli a liar and yelling at him to get out of the apartment. At 4:46, the building's management called 911 to report a disturbance in their apartment.

2:05 At 4:57, Clenney called 911 herself and told the operator that Obumseli had been stabbed and needed help. And here is the line from that call that ended up in the warrant. In the background, the victim can be heard repeatedly saying he is dying and that he cannot feel his arm. Clenney can be heard saying, I'm so sorry baby. Investigators put the stabbing somewhere between 4:43 and 4:57. Fourteen minutes, at the outside, is the window they gave for it, and he had been back in the apartment since 4:32.

2:35 Police got to the apartment and found Clenney holding him. He had a stab wound to the chest. He was taken to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial, and he died. TMZ later published a photograph of Clenney in the hallway of the building, talking to Miami police, covered in blood. The warrant notes something else about that scene. There was blood throughout the condominium at different levels, including two large pools of it. Investigators took that to mean he had been bleeding for a long time before anyone got there.

3:01 Christian Tobechukwu Obumseli went by Toby. He was born in Dallas and went to Plano East Senior High School in Texas. He earned a football scholarship to Abilene Christian University, then transferred to Texas Tech to study engineering. He worked in cryptocurrency, and he also worked as a kind of assistant to Clenney. His obituary calls him a free spirit with larger than life dreams, and says his fun-loving attitude let him be comfortable in almost any atmosphere. Courtney Taylor Clenney was born in Midland, Texas, in April 1996, and her family moved to Austin when she was seven.

3:31 She wanted to act from a young age. She did commercials, and she had a small part in a 2016 movie. What actually made her famous was social media. Under the name Courtney Tailor she built a following of nearly two million on Instagram, and she had a large OnlyFans income. In 2020 she made about 900,000 dollars from OnlyFans. In 2021, more than 1.8 million. They started dating in November 2020. They were together a little under two years. One more thing about her, because it comes up later.

4:00 Rolling Stone reported she had one DUI conviction in Texas and another case pending there. A friend of the couple described the pattern to that magazine as her always having these manic episodes, dragging him into it, and him trying to say calm down, calm down. Her own attorney would later call it, simply, a toxic relationship that had its ups and downs and unfortunately culminated with his death. Now the part that shaped everything else. The State Attorney's office described their relationship as extremely tempestuous and combative, going back to November 2020.

4:28 Police put it in the warrant this way: multiple incidents of domestic violence from both sides over the period of their relationship. I want you to hold on to that phrase, from both sides, because both the prosecution and the defense spent four years arguing about which side it meant. Here is what was documented against Clenney. In July 2021, she was arrested in Las Vegas on a domestic battery charge after an incident in a hotel room with Obumseli. Police were called to their home in Austin multiple times.

4:54 And after they moved into One Paraiso in January 2022, the arguments started almost immediately. There were so many documented incidents that management was preparing legal action to evict them. Tenants two floors up could hear them. One detail from Las Vegas matters more than it looks. The Miami Herald reported she was arrested there after she admitted to throwing a glass at him. That was nine months before the stabbing. Keep it in mind, because it turns up again later in how police finally described this relationship.

5:22 And then there is the video. On February 21, 2022, at about 8:30 at night, a camera in the building's elevator recorded about a minute of them. Clenney gets in, hits the floor-selection screen hard. Obumseli gets in behind her and motions for her to stop. She hits him, repeatedly. She pulls at his shirt and his hair. He pushes her away and holds his arms up to block her. He does not hit back. He gets out of the elevator, and she follows him out, still hitting him. Prosecutors released that video at a news conference.

5:51 It is the single most-seen piece of evidence in this case. I want to be honest about what that video does to a person watching it. It is about sixty seconds long, and the man in it never raises a hand. If you only ever see one piece of this case, that is the one you will see, and it is very hard to look at it and then hear that he was the abuser. That is exactly what the defense spent four years worried about. But the same warrant that describes that video also contains this sentence: while certainly not one sided, the evidence shows there were prior incidents of the defendant being physically violent with the victim.

6:24 Police wrote that the events were certainly not one sided, and then they did not elaborate. That one clause is where the entire defense lived for four years. The relationship kept breaking. They split up several times, and the last time was the last week of March 2022, when Clenney put him out of the apartment for about a week. On April 1, they got back together and he moved back in. That same night, police were called to the building on a domestic call. Clenney made the report.

6:49 She told officers Obumseli had been stalking her and asked them how to get a restraining order. She said, I have not always been a victim, but like right now I am the victim in this situation. One account says she had bruises on her arms and legs. The officers noted she appeared intoxicated. Nobody was arrested. Stop on that for a second, because April 1 is the whole case in miniature. Inside one police visit you have a woman saying she is being stalked and asking about a restraining order, visible bruises on her, and an officer writing down that she seemed drunk.

7:17 Everybody in this story had a version, and the versions did not fit together, and nobody had to decide between them that night. Two days later he was dead. Here is the part of this case that made a lot of people angry, and I think you should understand why. On the night of the stabbing, Clenney gave police a recorded statement and was sent home, pending investigation. She was not arrested. At the time, the preliminary read was that this looked like self-defense in a mutual fight.

7:41 Her attorney, Frank Prieto, said publicly that this was not a crime, that she was innocent, that she had acted in self-defense, and that no charges should be filed. He told Rolling Stone that Obumseli had been committing a crime, that she had every right to defend herself, and that she felt horrible. There is one more thing about that night. It was investigators who broke the news to her, during a police interview, that Obumseli had died. Then four months went by. Clenney went to Hawaii.

8:06 Her attorney says she was there in a program for substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her lawyer and detectives had also had her committed for psychiatric evaluation under Florida's Baker Act after the stabbing. Obumseli's family spent those four months saying, publicly and repeatedly, that Clenney was getting preferential treatment because she was a wealthy white woman and Obumseli was a Black man. Their attorney, Larry Handfield, said the family believed that once a full investigation was done she would be held to account for taking his life.

8:33 His cousin, Karen Egbuna, said at a news conference that the family had no cause to believe this was self-defense. I am not going to tell you what was in anyone's head. I will tell you the sequence. A man was stabbed to death, the woman who did it went home that night, and it took four months and a medical examiner's report for a charge to be filed. There is one more fact in that stretch worth knowing. The Miami Police Department's own early statement said the preliminary investigation determined that both Obumseli and the female had been involved in a physical altercation.

9:01 That is how it was framed at first, as a fight. Rundle's office then opened a review that ran four months, and Miami police went back through it with the State Attorney's office, obtaining several warrants and subpoenas, pulling cellphone extraction data, recorded statements, 911 calls and records, and taking information from law enforcement agencies in other states. What changed was the science. Clenney's account to police was that Obumseli shoved her against the wall by her neck, threw her to the ground, and that she picked up a kitchen knife and threw it at him from more than ten feet away.

9:31 A thrown knife. She said she never meant to kill him. The Miami-Dade Chief Medical Examiner, Kenneth Hutchins, found that the cause of death was a stab wound to the chest and the manner was homicide. The knife went in at a downward angle, to a depth of eight centimeters, about three inches, and it punctured the subclavian artery on the right side of his chest. That wound explains what officers found in that apartment, the two large pools and the blood at different levels, and it explains what you can hear in the 911 call.

10:00 A wound like that, at that angle and that depth, does not come from a knife thrown across a room. That was the medical examiner's conclusion, and it is the hinge the whole case turned on. There was a second problem. Clenney said he had choked her and thrown her down. The Miami police chief, Manuel Morales, put it bluntly: there was no physical evidence to suggest she was actually harmed in any way on the day of the incident. No bruises consistent with choking. She never claimed he had a weapon.

10:27 And in her own recorded statement, after giving accounts that investigators called inconsistent, Clenney said this. I don't know. I really don't know if this was justified at all. There was one more thing in that warrant. At 5:25 that evening, twenty-eight minutes after the 911 call, a text arrived on Clenney's phone from Mom. It mentioned self-defense, and it advised her not to say anything to investigators without an attorney. There is a wrinkle in what her mother told police.

10:52 In her own recorded statement to investigators that day, she rejected the idea that she and her daughter had been discussing the fight while it was going on. She heard it happen. She told them she was not part of it. On the morning of August 10, 2022, officers from the Hawaii Police Department and United States Marshals arrested Courtney Clenney on Hawaii island, on a Florida warrant for second-degree murder with a deadly weapon. She was twenty-six. Her attorney said he was completely shocked, that they had been cooperating with the investigation and had offered to surrender her voluntarily if she was charged.

11:22 A reporter asked State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle why they had not let her turn herself in. Rundle said the circumstances were a little more unusual, that Clenney was far away on a remote island, and that the right thing was to go and get her and secure her presence. That afternoon she appeared before a judge in Hilo and waived extradition. Her public defender there asked the judge to keep cameras out, arguing that the international attention could hurt her chance at a fair trial.

11:46 The judge allowed the cameras. A prosecutor told the court she also had outstanding warrants in Nevada and Texas. The judge held her without bail. Rundle, at her own news conference in Miami that morning, said the violent and toxic two-year relationship of Christian Obumseli and Courtney Clenney did not have to end in tragedy, with Christian's murder as a victim of domestic violence. The warrant's own conclusion was that the two had been in a violent and toxic domestic relationship for over two years, which often escalated into Clenney throwing or using weapons, and that on April 3 she acted without justification, in an imminently dangerous act demonstrating a depraved mind without regard for human life.

12:23 Clenney was extradited to Florida and held without bond. Prosecutors argued her social media income made her a flight risk. She stayed in the Miami-Dade jail, at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, and she pleaded not guilty. She would stay in that jail for four years. A county jail, not a prison, held without bond, while both sides fought over depositions. That is worth knowing when you hear that her sentence is six years and she has about two left. Nearly all of the first four were served before anyone had decided she was guilty of anything.

12:51 Now I want to give the defense its due, because a plea deal does not mean the defense had nothing. Frank Prieto said the arrest warrant contained deceptive and incomplete statements. He said it was a shame the State Attorney's office was trying to win the case in the court of public opinion by showing what he called an irrelevant and likely inadmissible elevator video. His point about that video was that it does not show what happened before it started. His position on Obumseli was blunt.

13:16 Obumseli was the abuser, he said, the worst kind of abuser, who would manipulate and abuse Courtney in private when he thought nobody was around. He said the initial Miami police investigation had turned up an independent witness who saw Obumseli hitting Courtney in the head when he thought he was alone in her apartment. He said he was confident she would be exonerated and seen as a victim of domestic abuse who survived her abuser. Court filings show that at trial the defense planned to run a battered spouse syndrome case.

13:42 They had texts, alleged injuries, and incidents spread across Miami, Austin, and Dubai. One filing said Obumseli had engaged in a pattern of physical violence, intimidation, threats, stalking, controlling behavior, coercive control, manipulation, and emotional abuse, and that Clenney would testify to incidents in which he struck, grabbed, shoved, restrained and choked her. Some of it was specific. An April 2021 text in which she accused him of hitting her in the face as hard as you could, and his reply that he was trying to move her hand and really didn't mean to.

14:13 An August 2021 text saying he had been punching her in the back. A September 2021 argument about leaving a pool in which she says he grabbed her wrist and pulled her backward hard enough to dislocate her shoulder for the fourth time. A trip to Dubai where she says an argument about marijuana ended with him shoving her hard enough that she believed she had fractured her ribs, and she did not get it looked at. An incident in Austin in January 2022 that she says left her with an injured finger.

14:39 Here is where I have to be careful, and so should you. Those are allegations in a court filing. They were never tested in front of a jury, and the man they accuse has been dead since 2022 and cannot answer them. Both sides also pointed at that same Aspen video, the one from a trip weeks before his death where she is screaming at him and hitting him, and each side said it proved their client was the one being abused. That tells you something about how this case would have gone at trial.

15:02 The case took four years to get anywhere, and most of that was procedure. It was set for trial at the end of April 2026, then pushed when both sides filed a joint motion. Prosecutors had fifteen or sixteen depositions scheduled and witnesses were not showing up, including witnesses they wanted under Florida's Williams rule, which lets the state show a pattern of past conduct. The defense had the same problem in April, and by a June 1 hearing said they were back on track, that they had finally examined the knives, and that more than eight depositions were coming.

15:31 Judge Andrea Wolfson made it clear there would not be another delay. She asked, if we're in the same position next time we come back and these witnesses are just not appearing, there's going to come a time when it's fish or cut bait, right. There was a civil case running alongside all of this. Months after her arrest, Obumseli's family sued. They sued Clenney for battery, and they also sued the condominium association, the property manager, and the security companies, arguing the building failed to provide adequate security when the attack was foreseeable.

15:58 On December 3, 2025, the estate filed a notice of settlement as to Clenney only. Those claims were dismissed with prejudice on March 4, 2026. The financial terms have never been made public. The suit against the building continued, and in that one the companies agreed to cover outstanding hospital and medical bills and related liens in exchange for a dismissal. Think about what that lawsuit was arguing. Not just that she did it, but that the building knew. Management had documented the arguments.

16:24 Neighbors two floors up had heard them. The company was preparing to evict them over it. The family's position was that with all of that on the record, what happened in 2201 was foreseeable, and somebody with a security desk in the lobby should have seen it coming. Ten days after that last civil order, on July 31, 2026, Clenney's lawyer told TMZ she had reached a plea deal. Civil case closed first, criminal case second. Lawyers do it in that order on purpose, so statements from one proceeding cannot be used against a defendant in the other.

16:52 Her lawyers confirmed there was a deal but would not say what was in it, and they were careful to add that its terms were not final unless the court accepted them. A defense attorney named Jack Palmeri explained why anyone takes one. It is never a slam dunk case, he said. Nothing is ever a gimme when it comes to trial, so everyone has exposure. On August 10, 2026, Courtney Clenney pleaded guilty to manslaughter with a deadly weapon. Second-degree murder came off the table, and with it the possibility of life.

17:20 The sentence is six years in state prison, followed by five years of probation, with credit for the four years she had already served. That means about two more years, and with credits she could be out in something over a year and a half. On release she has to undergo mental health and substance abuse evaluation and treatment. She was to be transferred out of the county jail to a Florida state prison. Prosecutors also made a point of saying she should not profit from this. Assistant State Attorney Shawn Abuhoff said they believe nobody should benefit financially from murdering somebody, and that they would work hand in hand with the Florida Attorney General's office on any lien or financial proceeding against her.

17:54 She reserved the right to challenge that. The family was in the room. Obumseli's mother, Chio, read a statement. There is simply too much pain to put on paper, she said. Four years later, there are still nights when I cannot sleep. I do not want Christian to be remembered only for how he died. She said everyone who knew him could attest he was kindhearted, compassionate, friendly and respectful. She said nothing can describe what it feels like for a mother to stand at the grave of her child.

18:20 And she said the family had lived with the loss every day and waited for accountability. Today closes a legal chapter, she said, but it certainly doesn't close our grief. No sentence, no plea can bring back my son to me. A cousin said that April day was the darkest of her life, and that the darkness kept unfolding as she learned Christian had been killed by someone he had trusted and loved. Since April 2022, she said, she has lived with fear, anxiety, sleepless nights, heartache and more tears than she could ever count.

18:47 Words can never fully explain, she said, how Christian's death has affected my life and the lives of everyone in our family. A family representative spoke directly to Clenney. Your actions have left the Obumseli family with a void that can never be filled, they said. A chair where a family gathers for holidays will always remain empty. His life had meaning. He had a future. And his family deserved to grow with him. He was robbed of all those things, while you still have all yours to enjoy.

19:14 The family also told the court something that has stayed with me. They said he had stayed in a relationship they called destructive despite previous violence, that he had been cut in the face and stabbed before, and that he had written about his fear that his love for Courtney Clenney could cost him his life. So what does this actually resolve? Less than a verdict would have. State Attorney Fernandez Rundle said the family finally heard what they had long sought, Courtney Clenney accepting full responsibility for his death.

19:38 She said the plea was reached in full consultation and with the approval of Christian's family, that her prosecutors stayed focused on the core evidence that Clenney stabbed him as part of a pattern of escalating violence toward him, and that while nothing can heal the wounds, she hoped the plea brought a measure of justice too long denied. The family's attorney said pleading guilty and accepting full responsibility would begin the process of bringing closure. That is real. An admission in open court, from her own mouth, is something the family did not have for four years.

20:06 But a plea also closes the door on the questions. No jury ever weighed the battered spouse case. No jury ever heard the elevator video next to those text messages and decided what the relationship actually was. Palmeri was right, and it cut both ways: the state faced a self-defense claim and depositions that would not happen, and the defense faced a medical examiner and a video. What the record leaves us with is this. Two people in a relationship that everyone around them described as violent and toxic.

20:33 Documented violence by her, on camera, more than once. Serious allegations against him that never got tested. A man who died on an April afternoon in his own apartment, twenty-five minutes after walking in with sandwiches. And a plea, four years to the day after the arrest, that ends the case without ever answering it. Christian Obumseli was twenty-seven. If anything here sounds familiar to you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233. The warrant, the filings and the sentencing are public.

21:00 Read the file. Form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been CrimeTimeSnacks, and I'll catch you next time.