Student’s Killer Given Sentence of 25 Years to Life

Five years after Taft High School football player LaMoun Thames was fatally stabbed at a Woodland Hills bus stop, a judge on Wednesday sentenced his killer to the maximum term of 25 years to life in state prison.

“I have nothing left but a memory,” Thames’ mother, Ora “Denise” Rogers, told convicted murderer Oscar Lopez in an emotional confrontation in a Van Nuys courtroom.

“You’re getting off easy,” she told Lopez, “because you have a life.”

Lopez, 22, maintained that he is innocent.

“I apologize, but it wasn’t me. I’m going to have to pay for something I didn’t do. I’ll never see my mother.”

But Thames’ survivors said Lopez’s loss paled in comparison to theirs.

“He wasn’t a thug, he wasn’t a gang member, he was a good kid who wanted to live,” Shanise Anderson, Thames’ sister, told Lopez. “She can visit you in jail. We have to visit him in the cemetery.”

Before Lopez serves the sentence imposed by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Wiatt for first-degree murder, he must first serve at least 22 years for a series of armed robberies.