Through frantic screams, he told the California Highway Patrol officer who pulled him over that someone had just shot his wife, Vicki, through the window of the family’s burgundy Honda as they left a park in La Mirada. “We didn’t hear evidence of a real motive,” Gorin said. Leon Martinez, the convicted shooter, testified Thursday at the preliminary hearing that Ghonim hired him for $10,000 to kill Victoria Ghonim, 17, in a staged robbery while the couple were at Creek Park in La Mirada on July 23, 1992. Detectives followed a few leads, but the investigation went cold. The other version of what happened at Creek Park two decades ago comes from Ghonim. Advertisement 
 
 Cooper said Ghonim couldn’t describe the people in the group but knew it was composed of males and females. At the time, authorities were told that a man walked up to the family car, tried to rob the couple and shot Victoria Ghonim several times. The couple’s son was in the backseat. Defense attorney Alan Eisner delivers an opening statement in the trial of Morrad Ghonim, who is charged with hiring Leon Martinez to stage a robbery and kill his wife in 1992. Martinez, who admitted to dealing drugs in 1992, testified at the preliminary hearing in January that Morrad Ghonim offered him $10,000 to kill Victoria Ghonim. Martinez told others that he was hired for $500, according to Sgt. He pointed out that Morrad Ghonim was inside the car when Martinez shot Victoria Ghonim six times. Then in 2015, investigation arrested him in Antigua and Barbuda where he was living with his current wife, a former Miss Dominica. After Ghonim bought crack cocaine from him that same day, Martinez said, Ghonim asked if he knew anybody who would kill for money. They didn’t get into many details, Martinez said, but Ghonim told him that he wanted it to look like a robbery. “To my knowledge, the results of the test were negative,” Cooper said. “She said, ‘Don’t hurt my baby.’ I had no intention of hurting the baby,” Martinez said during the preliminary hearing. But Dmitry Gorin, one of Ghonim’s attorneys, questioned the motive of Martinez and Ghonim’s second wife. He shot Victoria Ghonim several times, including once in the head. She also testified that a few days before the slaying, she had seen Martinez with a man who she thought looked Middle Eastern.
– On July 23, 1992, Morrad Ghonim watched his 17-year-old wife die. The couple had taken their 6-month-old son to Creek Park in La Mirada, Calif. Ghonim said he felt uncomfortable after a group of people called out at his wife and he wanted to leave, reports the Los Angeles Times. But as they made to drive off, a gunman approached the passenger door, demanded money, and murdered his wife. Now, 24 years later, a jury has decided who was responsible for Vicki Ghonim's death: then-19-year-old Morrad Ghonim. The 43-year-old, who was extradited from Antigua last year, was on Monday found guilty of first-degree murder. The man who pulled the trigger, however, was Leon Martinez. Police got to Martinez by way of grant money earmarked for cold cases, reports the Whittier Daily News. A DNA test of pants found near the scene led them in 2010 to Martinez, who said Ghonim hired him and even reached over his wife's body to hand him payment. A friend of Martinez's relayed meeting a man days before Vicki's death who said he and his child's mother—a student at John Glenn High, as Vicki was—were having issues and planned to separate. In late January, the Daily News painted a picture of a confident defense, given that in exchange for testifying, Martinez will not serve life without parole for the murder, but instead 28 years to life. "This is a 20-year-old murder that comes down to the credibility of a convicted killer and an ex-wife who hates Mr. Ghonim ... and promised to send him to hell," said one of Ghonim's lawyers, noting that Ghonim's second wife talked to police. Ghonim could be handed life without parole at his Dec. 19 sentencing.