Preliminary Hearing Set for LPL Network Firm Employee Charged in Double Murder
What You Need to Know
Double murder suspect Ramy Fahim was a research associate for LPL network RIA firm Pence Wealth Management.
He is accused of killing his co-worker, who was a marketing/media assistant, and the co-worker’s roommate.
Pence Wealth and the owner of the apartment complex where the victims lived face a wrongful death suit.
The next hearing for Ramy Hany Mounir Fahim, the employee at LPL-affiliated RIA firm Pence Wealth Management arrested in April 2022 as a suspect in a double homicide, has been scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 15, according to the website of the Superior Court of California for Orange County.
The preliminary hearing will be held at the court’s North Justice Center in Fullerton. The new date was set Friday during the third pretrial hearing for Fahim, according to the website.
Fahim, of Irvine, California, was charged with special circumstances murders for allegedly stabbing his co-worker and the co-worker’s roommate to death in their Anaheim apartment, according to Todd Spitzer, district attorney for Orange County.
The “special circumstances of lying in wait and multiple murders” make Fahim “eligible for the death penalty,” Spitzer said last year.
Fahim was charged with eight felony counts, including two counts of murder and two enhancements each of lying in wait, multiple murders and the personal use of a deadly weapon, Spitzer said in an April 2022 news release.
Fahim is accused of stabbing his co-worker, Griffin Cuomo, 23, and then stabbing Cuomo’s roommate, Jonathan Bahm, 23, in their Katella Avenue apartment in Anaheim at around 6:30 a.m. on April 19, 2022.
Pence Named in Wrongful Death Suit
In October, a wrongful death complaint was filed in the Orange County Superior Court by Los Angeles law firm Boucher LLP on behalf of Cuomo’s mother, Wendy Cuomo, against Pence Wealth Management and Laila Pence and Dryden Pence, president and chief investment officer, respectively. In addition, Advanced Management, owner of the Stadium House Apartment Complex, where the victims lived, was named as a defendant.
The next hearing scheduled in that case is a case management conference at 9 a.m. on July 17, followed by another hearing at 9 a.m. on Aug. 7, according to the court’s website.
Fahim had a “long history of mental health issues and a documented propensity for violence,” Boucher said in announcing the complaint. Pence Wealth Management had been “repeatedly warned that Fahim had a tendency toward violence, but they overlooked it, allegedly due to Laila Pence’s relationship with Fahim’s mother, Nabila Makram, the former Egyptian Minister of Immigration and Expatriate Affairs,” the firm alleged.
Despite not being a resident of Stadium House, Fahim was allowed into the building and “loitered in the complex’s common areas for more than six hours,” according to the law firm.
“This predictable, yet completely unchecked, act of violence is the product of Pence Wealth and Stadium House prioritizing their financial interests while discounting the value of human life,” said Raymond P. Boucher, the law firm’s founder and attorney for Wendy Cuomo.
“When the safety and life of others is at stake, business should not go on as usual,” Boucher continued. “Pence Wealth and Stadium House had duties to protect Griffin and Jonathan from Fahim. Their conscious failure to do so in order to improve their bottom lines has robbed both young men of their futures and their families of their support.”
Griffin Cuomo was a 23-year-old recent graduate of the Chapman University School of Communication, according to the law firm.