GREENSBURG - A Westmoreland County jury delivered two first-degree murder verdicts against a former postal employee who killed his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend more than six years ago.
The verdict returned Friday after two hours of deliberations by the nine-man, three-woman jury against Scott Allen Laich, 32, formerly of Loyalhanna, was identical to his conviction in 1997.
Laich, a Persian Gulf War veteran who worked as a mailman, was again convicted Friday of the July 29, 1996, premeditated murder of 23-year-old Krista Jill Omatick, of Derry Township, and John Eric Pistininzi, 37, of Saltsburg.
As a result, Laich faces a mandatory life prison term without the possibility of parole when he is sentenced within a month by Westmoreland County Judge Richard E. McCormick Jr.
After the verdicts were announced, Laich's attorney, Public Defender Dante Bertani, said the jury finding was not supported by the evidence presented during the seven-day trial.
"The commonwealth failed to disprove provocation and disprove passion," Bertani said.
The case against Laich was never a question of who fired the fatal shots but his state of mind when he killed Omatick and Pistininzi. Prosecutors presented six days of evidence in which they suggested Laich was upset that attempts to reconcile his 14-month relationship with Omatick, which ended a week before the shooting, were unsuccessful.
The final straw came when Laich sneaked up to the Derry home he once shared with Omatick, heard her having sex with another man, kicked in the front door and shot her once between the eyes at close range.
District Attorney John Peck said Laich purposely went to Omatick's home after she rejected his overtures to get together and then believed she lied to him about her intentions that night.
Laich drove up to the home, parked in back in a wooded area, took a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun he kept in his truck and went to the window to listen.
"The defendant is stalking Krista Omatick the way a person stalks his prey," Peck said.
In his closing argument to the jury, Peck said Laich's hatred over losing control of his girlfriend prompted him to take action. Hearing her having sex just added to his desire to formulate a plan.
"The defendant is enraged and starts a very precise military-type operation. He had a plan and carried it out with military-like precision.
He had done what he had set out to do," Peck said.
Once he kicked in the front door, Laich confronted Omatick, who was naked, on the steps leading to the second floor. After he shot Omatick, Laich continued up the stairs and fired a shot at a closed bedroom door.
He then opened the door and shot again, and one round hit Pistininzi in the chest.
Pistininzi died at the scene, and Omatick died shortly after being taken to Latrobe Area Hospital.
The defense argued during the trial that Laich was guilty of no more than a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter because he was provoked to kill by hearing his former lover in bed with another man.
Bertani urged jurors to consider that Laich suddenly became enraged when he discovered the woman he loved had betrayed him.
"Does a reasonable person walk away⢠Reasonable people might explode. At that state of the game it's resentment, it's betrayal. It occurred because Scott Laich is a human being," Bertani said.
Laich testified on Thursday that he shot and killed Omatick because he hated her for having sex with another man. Laich said he suspected Omatick lied to him when she rebuffed his attempts to get together that night by saying she was tired and was going to sleep.
Laich said he drove to Omatick's home to confirm his suspicions that he was being lied to. He told the jury he took his gun to the house because he had usually done that while he lived there with Omatick.
Laich's testimony came after jurors already had heard him twice before describe the shooting in detail. Prosecutors played a tape-recorded call to 911 in which Laich told a dispatcher he shot and killed his girlfriend. He also gave a taped-recorded confession to police hours after being taken into custody.
Laich did not testify during his first trial in 1997.
But the outcome of that trial was the same: two first-degree murder convictions.
But those verdicts were overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2001 when it ruled McCormick improperly allowed hearsay evidence by a neighbor who testified she overhead Laich say he intended to kill Omatick.
The appeals court ordered a new trial for Laich and vacated his consecutive life prison sentences.
