THIS BLOG IS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER – SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES
On April 3, 2022, Christian ‘Toby’ Obumseli was stabbed in the shoulder during an argument with his girlfriend, Courtney Clenney aka Courtney Tailor. He was pronounced dead around 5pm. Courtney has not yet been charged and many people are questioning why. This is the story so far.
We will start with some background into the two people involved –
Courtney was born Courtney Clenney (I believe) and she now goes by the name Courtney Tailor online. As of early April 2022, she is 25 years old. She was born in Midland, Texas on April 21, 1996.
There is a bio on Courtney online that says by the time she was 13, she decided she wanted to get into the entertainment industry. She ended up moving to Austin and did some extra work in movies in 2013 and 2014.
She progressed from that into fitness training and she created her instagram account – the handle is @courtneytailor – and she now has over 2m followers.
Courtney is pretty sporty – she trained as a high level pool diver and considered doing that competitively at one point. She has also been known to participate in soccer, volleyball, gymnastics and horseback riding.
Courtney has said that she was inspired by fitness model Ashley Kaltwasser – she competed in many bikini athlete comps.
She has appeared in commercials for Pepsi, Cirrus Logic, Celebration Church, and Discount Dollars. In October 2015, she appeared in the G-Eazy and Bebe Rexha music video “Me, Myself, & I”. In late 2015, she did a photoshoot for Playboy magazine. She did small roles in TV shows and movies like ‘American Psycho, The Lying Game, Unstalkable’, and Boyhood. Her most successful film role so far came in 2016, in the Richard Linklater movie ‘Everybody Wants Some!!
She also has a YouTube channel but that has not been updated for a few years – I guess insta is her main channel now.
A fun fact about Courtney is that she is afraid of sharks, even when swimming in a pool.
Courtney also has an OnlyFans account – Her OnlyFans profile says, “Proud Texan! Full-time fitness model and foodie living with my 2 dogs, Jesse and Ranger. I just moved to Miami so I need your positive vibes! Scary BIG change for this lil texas girl 💕”
An OnlyFans post on April 2, 2022, read, “talk dirty to me 💕” On April 1, she wrote, “I’m not always this nasty… wait, yes I am lol.”
Two weeks before this incident, Courtney appeared on the We In Miami podcast where she spoke about her dating preferences. “No, that’s not true. I only date Black guys. Especially Black guys … Let me clarify, I only date rich Black guys.”
Christian Toby Obumseli is the man involved in this case. He was 27 when he passed away on April 3, a week before his birthday when he would have turned 28.
Christian was also born in Texas – I believe in the Plano area.
Less is known about Christian. His social media says he is the owner of Wisemen & Peachtree LLC who “studied Communication Studies at Texas Tech University”. Before that, he went to Plano East Senior High School.
He is much less prominent on social media – his instagram handle is @christianvstoby and he has just over 7.5k followers.
His bio says:
Diór
1 Corinthians 13:11
I looked up what that bible verse is:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I believe Christian and Courtney met in Texas and moved to Florida together, a few years ago.
News of the murder first broke publicly on April 6.
This article from NBCMiami is similar to what all agencies were saying. A man had been stabbed but the female involved had not been named.
Police are investigating after a man was fatally stabbed at a Miami high-rise over the weekend in what officials are calling a domestic dispute.
The incident happened Sunday night at the One Paraiso luxury building at 3131 Northeast 7th Avenue in Edgewater.
Miami Police officials said officers responded to a report of a man stabbed at the building and found the 27-year-old victim, who was rushed to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Officials said a woman was detained at the scene and later taken for a mental health evaluation. Her identity wasn’t released.
Police haven’t released the victim’s name, but friends identified him as Christian Toby Obumseli.
The friends said Obumseli lived in the building with his girlfriend. They said the two moved to South Florida from Texas in the past couple years.
Some of the couple’s friends spoke to the media in the early days:
“He was just really high-energy, bright, intelligent, would bring a smile to anyone,” friend Josh Ramsey said. These are our two friends we’ve gone on vacation with, we go to dinners with, we go out on the town with them, and it seems like it’s straight out of a crime documentary,” Ramsey said. “We would have never guessed it would have escalated to this point. I think I speak for our whole friend group, we are just shocked. Very distraught about this.”
Miami Police spoke to the media and said there had been an altercation and that Christian had been stabbed once in the shoulder.
“The preliminary investigation determined that both Mr. Obumseli and the female had been involved in a physical altercation,” the Miami police told the Miami Herald.
Police also said that the female called 911 to report the incident and was taken to a mental hospital after she threatened to kill herself.
Even though police did not initially release the name of the female, it came out very quickly on social media.
TMZ even got a video that must have been taken from a neighbouring apartment. We will put it on the blog.
In the video, Courtney can be seen wearing a bra and sweatpants and she is covered in blood. She is handcuffed and sitting on the floor. Her dogs are running around and you can see police talking to her.
Courtney did an instagram live earlier that day and was wearing the same clothes that she can be seen wearing in this video.
As soon as Courtney’s name became public, so did the allegations of physical and domestic abuse by both parties.
A woman named Ashley Vaughn who knew both Christian and Courtney said:
“We’ve seen her hit him. I’ve never seen him hit her.”
“From what we’ve personally experienced between the both of them, we believe that Christian wouldn’t put her in a position where she would need to stab him to protect herself,” Ashley said.
A neighbor who had a clear view into the couple’s apartment though, said the complete opposite.
“I could not tell if it was open-handed or closed-handed, but he was swinging at her,” he said.
Police say in the past three months, they’ve responded to multiple disturbance calls at the couple’s apartment.
There are no cases for Courtney in the Miami-Dade court record archive.
Christian’s family argue that there was no way this murder would have happened in self defense. “There’s many unanswered questions and we just want justice for our brother, keep us in your prayers,” brother Jeffrey Obumseli said.
His cousin Karen Egbuna said the family has no reason to believe the murder was an act of self defense.”We have no reason to believe this is self-defense,” she said. “This is one of the youngest in the family, he is loved, he is kind, he is caring, soft-spoken, the idea that this is somehow warranted, is unthinkable.”
Jeffrey Obumseli said his brother had been a star athlete and captain of his high school football team and had a bright future.
“My brother was so caring, my inspiration, an inspiration to others,” he said. “He was a friend to everyone, very caring, funny, very bright, he had big dreams.”
Courtney has hired an attorney, Frank Prieto. He told the Herald that she acted in self-defense and was a domestic violence victim. “As Courtney struggles with the pain of being a survivor of domestic violence and the aftermath of the events that evening, we ask that the community and Christian’s family allow the police and the state to conduct their independent investigation of the events,” he said to the newspaper. “This is a tragedy for all involved but it was not criminal conduct; Courtney was defending herself and the investigation will reveal exactly that.”
Frank also told TMZ that he believes Courtney is the victim of “physical, emotional, and mental abuse at the hands of Mr. Obumseli,” while also suggesting she may even have been a “victim of human trafficking,” without elaborating much further.
He claims, “At the time of the incident, Mr. Obumseli was committing a forcible felony. He had gained access to Courtney’s apartment without permission on several occasions in the days leading up to this incident.”
The Miami Herald have now been reporting that Christian and Courtney broke up a month ago. Courtney told her mother that she was scared to leave her apartment because Christian kept finding ways into the building and he would sleep in common areas.
They are also reporting that police were called to the apartment on April 1, just days before the murder. Miami police officers noticed bruises on Clenney’s arms and legs, law enforcement sources told the Miami Herald. No arrests were made at that time.
The same article says that Courtney stabbed Christian after he pushed her to the ground and grabbed her neck.
On April 8, we learned that Courtney is definitely no longer being held under the Baker Act. She was seen at a hotel bar in Miami, just five days after the murder.
Another hotel patron videoed Courtney and her father at the Grand Beach Hotel in Miami on Friday night.
“You should go. Yeah, you should go,” the guest, who goes by the Instagram username nnenna_xoxo, tells Courtney and her father in the video.
Courtney and her father can be seen getting up and leaving.
The video has been shared all across the internet and people are now questioning how someone who is so ‘mentally unstable and suicidal’ can be out at a bar, so soon after the incident?
Courtney’s attorney has released a statement:
“It is unfortunate that a member of the public, knowing absolutely nothing about the circumstances and events surrounding the death of Mr. Obumseli, would take the opportunity to harass the Clenney family during a time when they are trying to be supportive of Courtney,” Prieto said. “Courtney was seated at a table in the hotel lobby area where there is also a bar. Courtney’s father was standing there trying to order a drink to take outside so they could be in private on the beach.”
The main question we have been getting online is why have no charges been filed.
Florida’s Stand Your Ground law makes it more challenging to file charges, or get convictions, when people claim self-defense. “When the investigation is completed, the State Attorney Office will review the police department’s evidentiary presentation and take appropriate legal action in accordance with the law,” the office said in a statement.
For anyone not familiar with the Stand Your Ground law, it came into effect on October 1, 2005 in Florida.
A stand-your-ground law (sometimes called “line in the sand” or “no duty to retreat” law) provides that people may use deadly force when they reasonably believe it to be necessary to defend against deadly force, great bodily harm, kidnapping, rape, or (in some jurisdictions) robbery or some other serious crimes (right of self-defense). Under such a law, people have no duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, so long as they are in a place where they are lawfully present.
There is a GFM for Christian and it has raised over $70k.
On August 10, 2022, Courtney Tailor was arrested in Hawaii and was charged with murder.
‘I’m completely shocked, especially since we were cooperating with the investigation and offered to voluntarily surrender her if she were charged,’ said her lawyer, Frank Prieto.
‘We look forward to clearing her name in court.’
Source List:
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/courtney-tailor-29932.php
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article260245710.html#storylink=cpy
https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-model-courtney-clenney-hotel-miami
CLIPS USED IN THE PODCAST:
https://youtu.be/oxFb9xd21-E
https://youtu.be/GECFdrOPMxo
https://youtu.be/LeUcL_tB3pk
https://youtu.be/2BH8pgXLUGo
https://youtu.be/3aCleWtJS_w
https://youtu.be/-sxAdtbgmrI