While an OnlyFans model awaits her murder trial, dead man’s family makes its own case
Karen Egbuna remembers how her family gathered in Texas around Thanksgiving to celebrate, bond, play games, go bowling..
Cousin Christian “Toby” Obumseli, the youngest in the family, would usually win. But those days of family fun are now memories a year after Obumseli was stabbed to death in a luxury Miami apartment.
Courtney Clenney, 27, is behind bars on a second-degree murder charge since her arrest in the April 2022 killing of Obumseli, 27. Clenney, who was arrested four months after the killing, had millions of followers on Instagram and OnlyFans, a site where models are often paid for racy or explicit content.
Egbuna, who has taken on the role of family spokesperson, gathered with attorneys in Coral Gables on Tuesday to discuss updates in the case and a lawsuit the Obumseli family filed in April.
The negligence and wrongful death lawsuit names Clenney and the One Paraiso Condominium Association, as well as property’s management, owner and security services. Association lawyers could not be immediately reached for comment.
Lawyer Michael Haggard, who is representing the family in civil court, pointed to the six 911 calls multiple tenants made in the three months Obumseli and Clenney lived in the One Paraiso apartments in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood.
“This was a murder that the civil defendants knew was going to happen,” Haggard said. “There’s no question about that.”
Condominium associations, management and security usually act in domestic violence situations after one call, Haggard said. That wasn’t the case, despite Clenney being caught on tape in the apartment’s elevator hitting Obumseli.
“Had the defendants done anything, had they had her evicted, had they had her thrown out, had they been more aggressive with the police ... this never [would’ve] occurred,” he said.
For attorney Larry Handfield, the Obumseli family was previously denied justice twice: When they learned about Obumseli’s death through a call from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office related to an organ donation and when the case was quickly closed without a thorough investigation.
Now, they’re expecting the criminal trial to start by end of the year.
“The family wants justice,” Handfield said. “And true justice is accountability, the person responsible for taking their loved one’s life accepting responsibility for her actions.”
For Egbuna, it was shocking to learn the details of Obumseli and Clenney’s toxic relationship. Her tight-knit family will never be the same without him, who she described as a soft spoken but confident man.
“Nobody could’ve anticipated this,” Egbuna said. “Unfortunately, I think that this case has really brought up the dynamics and the biases we have when it comes to domestic violence, especially when the woman is the aggressor.”
Domestic violence and a murder
Before he was stabbed to death, Christian “Toby” Obumseli chronicled his tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Courtney Clenney in a series of a text messages and disturbing recordings that included racial slurs and Clenney screaming and berating him.
READ MORE: Slain boyfriend of OnlyFans model secretly recorded her raging outbursts, racial slurs
The recordings and messages, included as evidence in the murder case against Clenney offer a glimpse into their toxic relationship — and may soon be presented to a jury to paint her as a domestic abuser who plunged a knife into the chest of her boyfriend inside their luxury Miami apartment.
In the less than two years that the pair dated, Clenney had been arrested for domestic battery in Las Vegas. Police were also called to their Austin, Texas, home several times.
Defense attorneys, however, have insisted that Clenney — not Obumseli — was the victim. Lawyer Sabrina Puglisi said last October that Clenney would often “protect” “Obumseli over fears that “as a Black man, [he] could be hurt or harmed if he was ever arrested by the police.”
Despite the multiple occasions police were called to the couple’s Edgewater apartment, Obumseli was never arrested, Haggard said Tuesday.
The murder case and its plotline — a white female influencer accused of killing her boyfriend, a young Black professional — has garnered international media attention. It’s also a twist on a majority of domestic violence cases, with prosecutors casting Obumseli as a long-suffering male victim while defense attorneys insist Clenney stabbed him in self-defense.
An earlier version of this story misspelled Ombuseli’s last name on a few references
