MIAMI — The 911 call is painful to hear: Miami Only Fans model Courtney Clenney, over the sound of a barking dog, frantically summons help as her boyfriend lays mortally wounded, a stab wound to his torso.
“I can’t feel my arm. I can’t my feel my arm,” Christan “Toby” Obumseli can be heard saying calmly.
“My boyfriend is dying of a stab wound!” Clenney cries. “Baby, I’m so sorry!”
Unsaid on the call was that Clenney was the one who stabbed Obumseli, who would later die of a single knife wound to the heart. Prosecutors this week released the 911 call, as well as police body-cam footage of cops speaking to Clenney days before the killing during a domestic-disturbance call at the couple’s luxury high-rise Edgewater apartment.
Clenney, 26, is charged with second-degree murder with a deadly weapon for fatally stabbing Obumseli on April 3, 2022. Prosecutors say Obumseli was unarmed, and that she was the aggressor. She is claiming self-defense — her defense team insists she, not Obumseli, was the victim of domestic violence.
Attorney Larry Handfield, who represents the Obumseli family, says the 911 call speaks for itself.
“It shows her state of mind. She’s saying she’s sorry because she’s realizing what she’s done,” Handfield said. “She’s not saying, ‘I was defending myself.’”
Clenney’s defense lawyer, Sabrina Puglisi, said the audio shows she was put into a situation she didn’t want to be in. “This is not someone that stabbed somebody and didn’t care. Obviously, you can hear from her emotions she’s asking for somebody to come quickly to help,” Puglisi said.
Worldwide attention
The murder case has garnered media attention across the world, in part because Clenney lived such a public life, with millions of followers on social media. On Instagram, she regularly posted racy photos of herself, and on OnlyFans, a site where performers often post content for money.
Clenney and Obumseli had a notoriously stormy on-again, off-again relationship. They’d only lived in Miami since January, renting a luxury 3-bedroom apartment on the 22nd story of One Paraiso. Their arguments were loud and very public — so many neighbors complained about the noise that the building was moving to evict them from the unit.
That night of April 1 and early into April 2, Miami police officers were called to the apartment and Clenney “appeared intoxicated,” according to police reports.
Clenney, in the lobby of the building, is recorded complaining that she broke up with Obumseli and he’d been “stalking her,” sleeping in an elevator entrance way in front of her apartment.
“I want a restraining order against Christian Obumseli. I’m serious. Where can I do that? How can I make myself first? ‘Cause I know him and I know he’ll do it,” Clenney says.
One of the Miami police officers repeatedly explains that she has to go to court for a restraining order, and that police cannot issue a trespassing warning to Obumseli because he legally lives in the unit with her.
“I have not always been a victim, but like right now I am the victim in this situation,” she says.
Her defense attorney, Sabrina Puglisi, insists that the video illustrates that she is a domestic-abuse victim. “It’s very clear from the video she looks upset. She’s emotional. She’s crying. She’s upset that she can’t even walk her dogs all day for fear of being followed by Obumseli,” said Puglisi, who is representing her along with Frank Prieto.
But Handfield, the attorney for Obumseli’s family, said the disturbance, less than 48 hours before the killing, wasn’t relevant because Obumseli was never arrested and “everyone knew they had an on-again, off-again relationship.” He pointed out that Clenney had been arrested the previous year after Obumseli told police in Las Vegas that she threw a glass at him in their hotel room.
“There is a pattern when she drinks, she becomes as different person. What the defense is seeking to do is to try use an incident in which she is clearly intoxicated as justification for her taking Obumseli’s life two days later,” Handfield said.
The body-camera footage also shows a building manager describing how Obumseli “charged” at her before police arrived in the entrance way to the apartment. But Clenney, in an April 2 email to the building management, took umbrage with that description.
“He followed me into the elevator in the lobby and I put my hand up as (if) to say leave me alone. Nothing physical whatsoever,” she wrote. “A few minutes later, two front desk employees/security guards knocked on my door just before I was about to go to the pool.”
She accused the employees of falsely claiming she’d shoved Obumseli into the elevator. “This upset me because as I stated before, this was not a physical altercation and very quickly resolved,” she wrote.
“Lastly, he called police after I told him I didn’t want him to and there was no reason,” she added, complaining about the one of the employees.
Puglisi, the defense lawyer, claimed Clenney would “constantly protect” Obumseli, even though she was the victim.
“In her mind, it was that he, as a Black man, could be hurt or harmed if he was ever arrested by the police,” she said.
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