Unlike during her first trial, Shayna took the stand this time. She testified that on the night she shot Ryan, she had been sitting on the floor in his condo and, when she tried to get up, he pushed her back down. “I was hysterically crying,” she said, per video footage of the trial. “And I recall Ryan standing over me and grabbing the gun that was sitting on the table and pointing it at me and saying, ‘I could just kill you right now and get away with it, nobody would even know.'”
“I was shocked,” she continued, “I was afraid, I didn’t understand what I had done to deserve any of this.”
He put the gun back down on the table, Shayna testified, “still saying hurtful things, I don’t remember exactly what, and he was standing up from the chair and he was reaching across the table, and I don’t know if he was reaching for the gun or reaching for me. But I was still sitting on the floor at this point in time, and I got up off the floor and I grabbed the gun and I shot him.”
But the prosecution stayed its course that Shayna had committed a cold-blooded, premeditated crime, and, once again, it took the jury less than five hours to convict Shayna of murder on Aug. 29, 2018, rejecting a lesser charge of manslaughter. (On Killer Cases, Commonwealth Attorney Michelle Snodgrass said Shayna effectively “played a part for the jurors, for the judge, for the TV cameras” with her testimony.)
Ryan’s family said in a statement, “Today we embrace justice, and yet we do not feel joy. It has been six long and heartbreaking years without our beloved Ryan.”
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