LOWELL — Approximately 11 hours of jury deliberations and still no verdict in the trial for alleged murderer Timmy Chan.
On Tuesday, for the second day in a row, Judge Robert Ullman sent the Middlesex Superior Court jury home with Chan’s fate still hanging in the balance.
The jury, composed of nine women and three men, began deliberating in the late morning on Monday, after the closing of witness testimony in the trial, which began May 6.
Tuesday marked the first full day of deliberations, lasting approximately six and a half hours. The jury did not submit a single question throughout the day. The only question the group has asked thus far came on Monday, and it involved a technical issue they experienced while attempting to watch surveillance footage entered as evidence.
The issue was resolved.
Jurors are scheduled to dive back into the case at 9 a.m. Wednesday.
Chan is charged with several crimes, the most serious first-degree murder, for the shooting death of 20-year-old Nathaniel Fabian on the night of Oct. 13, 2021. The murder charge carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
If they decide against first-degree murder, the jury has the option of instead finding Chan guilty of the lesser charges of either second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter.
Fabian’s death was the result of online bullying initiated by Samantha Chum. Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Christopher Tarrant said during his opening remarks that Chum was Fabian’s ex-girlfriend who “did not take the breakup well.”
The target of Chum’s bullying was Thailynn Voraphonh, who was in an on-again, off-again relationship with Fabian. Voraphonh reached out to Fabian in the hopes he could put an end to the harassment. Fabian tried by contacting Chum, ultimately setting off the firestorm that ended in his death.
After Fabian contacted her, Chum reached out to her friends, Isabella Lach (Chan’s girlfriend), Jessie Sadia Segal-Wright, Chan, and Brian Lach (Isabella Lach’s brother, and Segal-Wright’s boyfriend), recruiting them to confront Fabian.
During the trial, Brian Lach and Segal-Wright, who were granted immunity for their testimony, implicated Chan as the gunman. Both were with Chan before and after the shooting, while Brian Lach testified he was with Chan at the time of the shooting. Segal-Wright, meanwhile, testified to using her car to drive them both from the murder scene. Isabella Lach was in the car at the time.
Chan is the only one who was charged for the crime.
As the jury began deliberating on Monday, Fabian’s mother, Stacey Braley, who along with many other loved ones has been in the courtroom gallery throughout the trial, expressed disappointment that more people were not charged for her son’s death.
At the same time, she pointed out she understood the prosecution’s decision to grant immunity to Brian Lach and Segal-Wright if it helped them capture the person who actually pulled the trigger.
Braley pointed out that all those involved in the shooting, except Chum, did not even know her son.
“The thing I keep on thinking of is if all these kids that were involved actually knew my son, they would have loved him,” Braley said. “Everybody he met, they always fell in love with him. … He was genuinely a very good person, and if they had an opportunity, they really would have liked him.”
Chan’s attorney, Jeffrey Sweeney, has contested during the trial that Brian Lach was the gunman. During his closing statements, he insisted to jurors that Brian Lach and Segal-Wright lied on the stand as a means to protect themselves.
Right before the jury was dismissed for the day on Tuesday, Sweeney said the trial “went as well as it could have gone.”
“The evidence came in really well,” he said. “Everything came in as I expected it to.”
In addition to murder, Chan is charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of a loaded firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, and discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a building.
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