Donta Allen stood up in Baltimore City Circuit Court on Monday morning with his interlaced fingers fidgeting behind his back and said that for killing 21-year-old Linda Trinh, he deserved his life sentence.
Speaking softly and haltingly in a courtroom filled with around 20 members of Trinh?s family, Allen, 28, said he was “impulsive, careless” and “not myself” in January 2005 when he beat and strangled the Johns Hopkins University biomedical engineering major to death in her Charles Village apartment.
“I took something away that was far better than I,” Allen said at his sentencing hearing, nearly two months after he pleaded guilty to her murder in exchange for a punishment of life in prison. “I realized that from the moment it happened.”
Allen never attended Hopkins but was well-known for hanging around campus, earning the nickname “Mr. Sketchy,” prosecutor Matthew Fraling said. At the time of the murder, Allen was dating a sorority member who lived in Trinh?s building, Fraling said, and had burglarized several apartments over the winter break.
Fraling said Allen broke into Trinh?s apartment on Jan. 22 thinking no one was home, but she surprised him. Trinh threatened to call the police, and Allen overpowered her.
Family members filled five benches on the opposite side of the courtroom from Allen, who asked but was told not to address them directly when he spoke and apologized. In his statement, Linda Trinh?s brother Quang dismissed Allen?s remorse as “convenient, self-serving and fake.”
“Linda was just too lovely, too sweet, too gifted, too caring, too perfect,” Quang Trinh said. “I will never forgive him.”
Trinh was remembered as a volleyball player and an ambitious scholar who carefully plotted out her life goals. Kestrel Linder, a classmate, said she was “one of my generation?s brightest” stars.
“One can hardly fathom what she would have accomplished,” he said, “given the time.”
