A Scotts Bluff County District Court jury on Thursday found 57-year old Gregory Moore of Scottsbluff guilty of 2nd-degree murder and felony use of a deadly weapon in the Nov 2020, stabbing death of 23-year old Fernando Camacho-McBride.
The jury, all female, deliberated only about an hour after hearing 4 days of testimony and evidence.
Ironically, the only defense witness was Camacho-McBride’s father, who’d told investigators his son wouldn’t back down from a confrontation or fight.
Moore’s defense was that Camacho-McBride had “significant” amounts of methamphetamine and the active ingredient of marijuana in his system when an argument between the men escalated and that Moore acted in self-defense.
Prosecutor and Assistant Attorney General Doug Warner told the jury that Moore never made such a claim to the police officers who found the body when responding to a report of a disturbance.
Warner said the evidence at the scene also failed to support self-defense, especially the fact that Camacho-McBride suffered a large number of stab wounds all over his body while Moore had just 1 small cut in the webbing of his fingers.
Moore faces a mandatory minimum of 20-years and a maximum of life on the 2nd-degree murder conviction and 1-50 on the weapons count. He’s scheduled for sentencing on July 21st,