NC jury finds Jonathan Broyhill guilty of first-degree murder

A jury has found Jonathan Broyhill guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Jamie Hahn and first-degree attempted murder in a knife attack that injured her husband Nation Hahn. Jamie Hahn was from Orangeburg, SC.

Gasps of relief filled the courtroom and tears quickly followed.

Sentencing is set for Thursday. Nation Hahn and family members will have an opportunity to provide Judge Paul Ridgeway with victim impact statements.

The verdict came quickly after 10 days of testimony and four hours of closing arguments. The prosecution got the last word on the case.

Joseph Arbour, the public defender representing Broyhill, got a few things out of the way at the start of closing arguments.

Broyhill killed Jamie Hahn, the much-admired political strategist and fundraiser married to Nation Hahn, Arbour said.

“He’s a chronic liar,” Arbour added about Broyhill.

“A darn good one and that’s why he’s not there,” the public defender said pointing to the witness stand.

Still, after condemning his client, Arbour told the seven women and five men on the jury tasked with deliberating his fate that Broyhill is not guilty of the crimes that prosecutors contend.

“The facts don’t support it,” Arbour said.

Arbour conceded that Broyhill could be found guilty of second-degree murder, but argued prosecutors had not given the jury evidence of premeditation, an element necessary for the first-degree offense of which he has been accused.

In a two-hour argument, his last chance with the jury, Arbour argued that his client went to the North Raleigh home where his friends, the Hahns lived, with a lifetime of problems and lies at such a boil that he was ready to end his own life.

“A tragedy happened that day,” Arbour said. “People that Jon loved probably the most in the world were part of that tragedy that day.”

But in a conversational manner that lacked much of the plodding, antagonistic style of his questioning during the 10 days of testimony, Arbour went down a checklist for the jury to consider as they weighed what was and wasn’t evidence.

Prosecutors contend Broyhill engaged in a frenzied knife attack at the Hahns’ home on April 22, 2013, as questions grew about irregularities in a campaign account from which he had taken more than $45,000.

But neither Jamie nor Nation Hahn knew at the time of the attack that so much money was missing, Arbour pointed out.

Jamie Hahn founded a political fundraising and strategizing company that had done work for former U.S. Congressman Brad Miller, a Democrat from Wake County. Broyhill helped manage the account, and during a two-year span took $46,500 from it.

Jamie Hahn and Broyhill were to go over the books that Monday afternoon in April when the violence occurred. They also were to work on a quarterly campaign finance report for the Federal Election Commission.

Jamie Hahn knew a check to cover a $600 Time Warner Cable bill for the campaign had bounced, but prosecutors presented no evidence that she knew Broyhill had been siphoning off thousands of dollars for so long, the defense team argued.

Prosecutors have introduced evidence as if they plan to argue that Broyhill lashed out with a butcher knife at the Hahns, waiting for an opportunity to cover up financial crimes that could have resulted in six months in prison, Arbour said.

There is evidence that he booked a train trip to Charlotte for that day, then changed the reservation for the next day after missing the train. There also is evidence that he was online several hours before the stabbings, searching Orbitz for a plane ticket from Charlotte to Las Vegas.

Arbour described those details of evidence that he planned to go to Las Vegas and kill himself.

“This makes no sense about a coverup,” Arbour said. “So why does he do it?”

“I think it’s about attention,” Arbour said. “This is a guy who wants attention. He’s craving it.”

For years, Arbour said, Broyhill not only had been feigning illnesses he never had, he also had been living beyond his financial means.

In high school, when he was still living at home with his family, Broyhill declared bankruptcy. In the months before the stabbings, when he was drawing unemployment benefits that barely would cover his $300 monthly car payments, he was racking up bills at coffee shops and restaurants.

“He lives stupidly,” Arbour said.

He also was collapsing under the weight of his many lies and secrets, the defense contended and was ready to end his life.

Arbour with photographs taken inside the Hahns’ home and a diagram of the first-floor, pointed to blood stains and an overturned chair to describe what the defense contends happened.

Broyhill took the 8-inch Oneida butcher knife he had purchased at a Harris Teeter eight days before the attack and removed it from his backpack.

Jamie Hahn, who had been on the phone in a nearby room, could see through the french doors, Arbour posed.

“Nobody considered that maybe she walked in on him killing himself and tried to stop him,” Arbour said. “Maybe he was trying to kill himself and this young woman who cared for him like a mother walked in and tried to stop him.”

Nation Hahn was upstairs in the bathroom when he heard his wife scream out his name and Broyhill’s alternately.

He was halfway down the stairs when Jamie Hahn called out: “He’s trying to kill me.”

“He had finally reached the point where this was it. ‘I’m going. I’m checking out, and these people are going to stop me,’” Arbour said.

Jamie Hahn had been stabbed in her back, chest, face and abdomen. One of the wounds severed an artery. Another was through her liver.

“This was an act of wild violence,” Arbour said. “He did not premeditate and deliberate this. He is not guilty of first-degree murder.”

Nation Hahn testified that he found Broyhill poised over his bloodied wife, knife in hand, when he got to the bottom of the stairs.

Broyhill also slashed the hands of Nation Hahn, a hometown friend he had known for more than a decade and followed to Raleigh from Lenoir.

The Hahns fled the house, first Jamie, who collapsed in a neighbor’s yard, then Nation.

Broyhill was found by police inside the house, the skin on his wrists butterflied from knife wounds, and his abdomen opened so wide that his intestines were visible, according to testimony.

“This is a guy gone wild, with passion with more than reason,” Arbour said. “He had no intent to kill Jamie he’s just lashing out. …He had no intent to hurt Nation, he’s just lashing out.”

Arbour told the jury that Broyhill wanted to go to trial because he wanted to serve time for the crimes he committed.

“He’ll serve his punishment for what he did, not for something being trumped-up against him,” Arbour said.

Assistant District Attorney Doug Faucette argued against the defense’s suicide theory.

Broyhill did not write a suicide note, he said.

Broyhill might have been dark and despondent, Faucette said, but “his state of mind is he’s close to being caught.”

Faucette played portions of a tape of Broyhill talking with police during his closing arguments. He let jurors hear the 911 call from a neighbor.

Then he described points at which Broyhill could have taken different steps before the stabbings but instead continued with an action that Faucette contended was planned.

Broyhill did not leave the knife in his car that afternoon. Instead he took it inside. At some point, too, he had to take it out of the plastic casing it was in at the Harris Teeter supermarket when he bought it eight days earlier.

Faucette called Broyhill “strange,” “self-absorbed” and a “master manipulator.”

Though there was no evidence presented for which wound were inflicted first, Faucette argued that Broyhill showed his intent and premeditation when he stabbed Jamie Hahn in the back.

Faucette said it did not matter whether Broyhill was “twisted and calculating” or “a despondent broken person,” he came to a different theory than the defense about the evidence.

Broyhill, Faucette said, “did what he intended to do for whatever reason or reasons.”