The Miami Apartment Stabbing

Transcript generated from the episode script.

0:05 What's up guys welcome back to Crime Time Snacks. On August 10, 2026 a 30 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'd 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. This one is hard to talk about and I want to say why up front. A man is dead.

0:36 Christian Obumseli was 27 years old and his case is not a who done it. 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. One more thing before we

1:02 start. If any part of this sounds like your life, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 807-997-233 they. That is in the notes for a reason. Let's unpack it. They lived in unit 2001 at 1 Paraiso Residences, a luxury high rise on Northeast 7th 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 2015 in the afternoon, Obumseli left with the dogs to pick up Subway for the two of them. While he was out,

1:34 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 4032, he came back into the building with the dogs and the sandwiches. At 4043, 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 4046, the building's management called 911 to report a disturbance

2:04 in their apartment. At 4057, Clenney called 911 herself and told the operator that Obumseli had been stabbed and needed help and here's 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 4000-4000-57. 14 minutes at the outside is the window they gave for it and he had been back in the apartment since 4000-1000-1000-002. Police got to the apartment

2:37 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. Christian Tobichak Obumseli went by Toby.

3:03 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 7. She wanted to

3:31 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 Taylor she built a following of nearly 2 million on Instagram and she had a large OnlyFans income. In 2020 she made about $900,000 Schmuelney fans. 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. Rolling Stone reported she had one DUI

4:01 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 Clenny. In July 2021 she was arrested in Las Vegas on a domestic battery charge after an incident in a hotel room with Obam Selle. Police were called to their home in Austin multiple times. And after they moved into one perreso in January

4:58 22 the argument 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 that thrown 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. And then there is the video. On February 21 2022 at about 8,030 at night a camera in the

5:28 building's elevator recorded about a minute of them. Clenny gets in, hits the floor selection screen hard. Obam Selle gets in behind her in 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. 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

5:58 it. It is about 60 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. Police wrote that the events were certainly

6:25 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 Clenny 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. Clenny made the report. She told officers Obam Selle had been stalking her and asked them how to get a restraining order. She said,

6:54 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. Everybody in this story had a version and the versions did not fit together and nobody had to

7:22 decide between them that night. Two days later he was dead. Here's 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, Clenny 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. 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.

7:50 He told Rolling Stone that Obam Selle 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 Obam Selle had died. In four months went by. Clenny went to Hawaii. Her attorney says she was there on 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

8:15 stabbing. Obam Selle's family spent those four months saying publicly and repeatedly that Clenny was getting preferential treatment because she was a wealthy white woman and Obam Selle was a black man. Their attorney Larry Hanfield said, the family believed that once a full investigation was done she would be held to account for taking his life. His cousin Karen Igbuna 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.

8:41 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 Obam Selle and the female had been involved in a physical altercation. 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

9:08 through it with the state attorney's office obtaining several warrants and subpoenas, pulling cell phone extraction data, recorded statements, 911 calls and records, and taking information from law enforcement agencies in other states. What changed was the science. Clennie's account to police was that Obam Selle 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 for more than 10 feet away. A thrown knife. She said she never meant to kill him.

9:34 The Miami day 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 in the blood at different levels, and it explains what you can hear in the 911 call. A wound like that at that angle in that depth does not come from a knife thrown across a room.

10:05 That was the medical examiner's conclusion and it is the hinge the whole case turned on. There was a second problem. Clennie 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. And in her own recorded statement, after giving accounts that investigators called inconsistent, Clennie said this,

10:32 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, 28 minutes after the 911 call, a text arrived on Clennie'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. 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.

10:59 She heard it happen. She told him 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 Clennie on Hawaii Island on a Florida warrant for second-degree murder with a deadly weapon. She was 26. 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. A reporter asked state attorney Catherine Fernandez Rundle why they had not let her turn herself in.

11:27 Rundle said the circumstances were a little more unusual, that Clennie 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 waved 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. The judge allowed the cameras. A prosecutor told the court she also had outstanding warrants in Nevada and Texas.

11:52 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 Clennie 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 Clennie throwing or using weapons, and that on April 3 she acted without justification in an

12:18 imminently dangerous act demonstrating a depraved mind without regard for human life. Clennie was extradited to Florida and held without bond. Prosecutors argued her social media income made her a flight risk. She stayed in the Miami-day jail at the Turner-Gilford 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.

12:46 Nearly all of the first four were served before anyone had decided she was guilty of anything. Now I want to give the defense its due because a plea deal does not mean the defense had nothing. Frank Piedos 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.

13:15 His position on Obamselli was blunt. Obamselli was the abuser, he said, the worst kind of abuser who would manipulate and abuse Courtney and Pry that when he thought nobody was around. He said the initial Miami police investigation had turned up an independent witness who saw Obamselli 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 filing showed that at trial the defense

13:39 planned to run a battered spouse syndrome case. They had texts, alleged injuries and incidents spread across Miami, Austin and Dubai. One filing said Obamselli had engaged in a pattern of physical violence, intimidation, threats, stalking, controlling behavior, coercive control, manipulation, and emotional abuse, and that Clinty 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

14:11 trying to move her hand and really didn't mean to. 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 accused 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 a trial. The case took four years to get anywhere and most of that was procedure.

15:06 It was set for trial at the end of April 2026 then pushed when both sides filed a joint motion. Prosecutors had 15 or 16 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. Judge Andrea Wolfson made it clear there would not be another delay.

15:34 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 Obam Sallie's family sued. They sued Clenny 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. On December 3rd 2025 the estate filed a notice of

16:01 settlement as to Clenny 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 neighbors two floors up had heard them. The company was preparing to evict them over it.

16:28 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, Clenny'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. Her lawyers confirmed there was a deal

16:54 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 Palmieri 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 Clenny pleaded guilty to manslaughter with a deadly weapon. Second-degree murder came off the table and with it the possibility of life. The sentence is six years in state prison followed by five years of probation with credit

17:24 for the four years she had already served. That means about two more years and with credit 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 Sean Abelhoff said they believed nobody should benefit financially from murdering somebody and that they would work hand in hand

17:50 with the Florida Attorney General's office on any lien or financial proceeding against her. She reserved the right to challenge that. The family was in the room. Obumselli's mother, Cio, 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 kind-hearted, compassionate, friendly and respectful. She said nothing can describe what it feels like for a mother to

18:19 stand at the grave of her child. 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 22, she said she has lived with fear, anxiety, sleepless nights, heartache and more tears than she could ever count.

18:48 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 Clenny. Your actions have left the Obumselli 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. The family also told the court something that

19:16 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 Clenny 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 Clenny accepting full responsibility for his death. She said the plea was reached in full

19:39 consultation and with the approval of Christian's family, that her prosecutor stayed focused on the core evidence that Clenny 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. But a plea also

20:06 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. Pomeroy 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. Documented violence by her, on camera, more than once.

20:36 Serious allegations against him that never got tested. A man who died on an April afternoon in his own apartment 25 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. Christiano Boomseli was 27. If anything here sounds familiar to you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-72333. The warrant, the filings, and the sentencing are public. Read the file. Form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me.

21:04 This has been Crime Time Snacks, and I'll catch you next time.