Man who said people in Fort Worth house walls were trying to eat him sentenced in murder

Adam Kodash was a house flipper who in the summer of 2021 was absorbed in two renovation projects.

After tools were stolen from one of the properties, a three-bedroom corner bungalow in the Carter-Riverside neighborhood just outside of downtown Fort Worth, Kodash needed someone to serve as a night watchman and thwart further burglaries.

He found such a security guard in Jonathan Benami, the 21-year-old son of Kodash’s rabbi. Kodash took pity on the young man, who showed signs of paranoia and who had lived in a car for a time after leaving his father and stepmother’s home in Roanoke.

Kodash offered to employ him, and Benami began to stay at the house overnight.

From the beginning, Benami’s demeanor was unusual. At times he used a mumbo jumbo nonsensical language, appeared around others in only his underpants and referred to Kodash as Satan. Kodash found the behavior to be a tolerable annoyance.

Eventually, after Benami damaged the house, his employer wanted him out, and he was jailed in an assault case in which he tussled with his father and stepmother.

By September, Benami was released. His father picked him up from the hotel where he spent the first night outside of custody and dropped him off at a homeless shelter downtown. Joseph Benami watched as the eldest of his three sons got in line outside. He had unsuccessfully sought help for his son’s delusions since he was in high school.

But Jonathan Benami did not stay at the Presbyterian Night Shelter. He broke a window at the rear of the house that he had previously worked to secure. The defendant took selfies in the bathroom and recorded video as he sang and aimed his cellphone’s camera at a knife embedded in the wooden front door.

Just after sunrise on Sept. 29, Tony Clark arrived at 1301 Eagle Drive and unlocked the front door. In his late teens and early 20s, Clark had served in the Air Force. At 76, he was a grandfather and had suffered a stroke four years earlier. Kodash had hired Clark’s son to renovate the house, and Clark was helping with the work.

Inside, Benami stabbed Clark 11 times, inflicting sharp force puncture wounds to his chest, back and arm. Benami and Clark were strangers. No one else was present.

A colleague found Clark’s body on the porch.

Accounts of the killing have been described over the past two weeks in the 372nd District Court in Tarrant County, where a jury first considered whether Jonathan Benami was guilty of murder and, after the panel concluded that he was, determined his punishment.

In the defense telling, the homicide was the product of severe mental illness, of Jonathan Benami’s broken mind, disordered thinking and hallucinations.

Jonathan Benami, who the jury learned in the trial’s first phase was diagnosed after the killing with schizophrenia, was protecting the house from demons, his defense attorneys argued.

The case was not a whodunit. Once the trial began, the defense told the jury that it did not dispute that Benami killed Clark.

Jonathan Benami believed that people in walls of the Eagle Drive house were trying to eat him, said Kodash, who was subpoenaed by the state, but was called as a defense witness.

“He was obviously psychotic,” Kodash testified last week.

The defendant did not think he was taking a human life, the defense argued.

“To Jonathan, it wasn’t real,” defense attorney Wesley Sackrule told the jury in his closing argument in the trial’s guilt-innocence phase.

Jonathan Benami may be civilly, morally or ethically culpable, but his mental illness prevented him from forming the intent required of a criminal murder conviction, defense attorney Scott Palmer argued.

“This kid was out of his mind,” Palmer argued.

With Palmer and Sackrule, Michael Levine was also retained to defend Jonathan Benami.

In the state’s argument, the killing was the intentional and knowing act of a profoundly dangerous man.

Inside the house, a hand print in Clark’s blood was on a piece of drywall in the living room.

“He had no idea what was waiting for him,” Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Ashlea Deener, who prosecuted the case with Deanna Franzen, told the jury in the state’s closing argument in the trial’s guilt-innocence phase.

The deliberation in that phase began on Friday at 4:08 p.m. and ended at 4:38 p.m. without questions or a request to examine exhibits in the jury room.

On Wednesday, after seven days of trial and deliberation of about two hours and 40 minutes, the jury assessed punishment at 70 years in prison. The panel considered a term of five to 99 years or life.

The defense argued that a sentence of more than 24 years, the defendant’s current age, would be irrational. Prosecutor Deener requested the maximum term.

“A day shy of a life sentence is an injustice,” she said.

In March, the state offered Jonathan Benami a plea bargain of 45 years in prison.

Earlier in the trial, Judge Julie Lugo denied a defense request for a jury instruction on manslaughter, a reckless killing. Lugo also denied defense requests for an instruction on self-defense justification and for an advisory on metal disease or defect.

Accepting the advice of his attorneys, Jonathan Benami did not testify in either trial phase.

“This was an especially disturbing crime for us,” testified Fort Worth Police Department Homicide Unit Detective Joey McAnally, the case’s lead investigator.

🚨 More top stories from our newsroom:

→ North Texas farmers say chemicals in fertilizer are killing livestock

→ Fort Worth ISD committed to working with city leaders, board says

→ First H-E-B to open in Dallas County

[Get our breaking news alerts.]

The defense did not designate as an expert at least 20 days before trial a forensic psychologist who examined the defendant, a requirement of the state’s code of criminal procedure. Judge Lugo did not permit the psychologist to testify before the jury.

Before trial, the defendant was twice found to be incompetent.

The state did not identify for the jury the precise weapon that they alleged Jonathan Benami used to stab Clark. They alleged it was a steel rod, a sharp object or an object unknown to the grand jury that indicted him.

A soil probe with a sharp end that was found on the porch in the victim’s blood leaned for much of the trial against the witness stand.