Who is TikTok star Ali Abulaban and what has he been sentenced for?
Ali Abulaban, a social media personality, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail. “The bottom line is he will die in prison,” the judge said.
Social media personality Ali Abulaban was sentenced in a San Diego courtroom to two consecutive life sentences in prison without parole, plus 50 years on Friday. “Who is Ali Abulaban?” Judge Jeffery Fraser asked before handing down the sentence.
“Someone that is only thinking about himself and the idea of killing two innocent people doesn’t disturb him. It’s chilling,” the judge said. “So, the bottom line here is he will die in prison. He will never be a free man. He will take his last breath there.”
Who is TikTok star Ali Abulaban and what has he been sentenced for?
The TikTok star, who went by ‘JinnKid’, was found guilty by a jury on two counts of first-degree murder for shooting his wife, Ana Abulaban, 28, and her friend, Rayburn Barron, 29, on October 21, 2021. Abulaban and his defense attorney, Jodi Green, argued during the trial that the murder of the two on a couch in the Abulabans’ apartment was committed in the heat of passion. Furthermore that he was suffering from addiction and mental health issues that impaired his ability to deal with his marital situation at the time.
The defense, seeking a voluntary manslaughter conviction, did not deny that Ali killed Ray and Ana “the woman he loved, the mother of his beautiful daughter, Amira,” but that he suspected that she was having an affair. So, when he saw the two on the couch together, he couldn’t control his emotions, “I snapped,” Ali testified, and he shot both of them. “But he did not murder them. He is not a murderer,” Green argued.
However, Deputy District Attorney Taren Brast laid out in the prosecution’s case that Ali had planned to kill his wife and any man that she was with out of rage that she was planning to leave him. While they were still married at the time of the murder, he told the jury that she had kicked him out of the apartment and was seeking a divorce to escape his abusive and controlling behavior.
Brast said during closing arguments that “heat of passion does not apply when you walk into an apartment that you had bugged, with a key card you were not supposed to have, to a fight that no one else knew was happening but you.” Ali stated that he had been to the apartment before the double murder and set up his daughter’s iPad to transmit audio via the Discord messaging app before hiding it.
When he overheard his wife and Ray talking while listening to the app, he rushed to the apartment armed with a gun and burst in. “It was willful, deliberate and premeditated,” Brast summarized.