Hiker Gets Prison for ‘Mercy Killing’

A backpacker who said he stabbed his best friend to death to spare him from more suffering as they wandered lost in the desert was sentenced Wednesday to serve two years in prison.

Raffi Kodikian, 26, pleaded no contest to second-degree murder for killing David Coughlin, 26, who Kodikian said asked to be killed after three days without food and water in the desert back country of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in August.

State District Judge Jay Forbes sentenced Kodikian to 15 years in prison but suspended all of the sentence except two years in a New Mexico prison and five years of probation.

“Raffi deserves to be punished for his violation of the law and taking of the life of his friend David Coughlin,” Forbes said during his sentencing. But the judge added that “a long incarceration, I think, has been proved here not to be the solution.”

Kodikian said the two had given up all hope of rescue or survival. Coughlin, in intense pain, begged him for what he called a mercy killing, Kodikian said.

“What I thought I was doing was keeping my friend from going through 12 to 24 hours of hell,” Kodikian testified in a 2 1/2-day hearing after pleading no contest Monday.

Kodikian and Coughlin, from Boston, were on a trip to the West Coast when they decided to camp one night in a Carlsbad canyon. But the next morning they could not find the trail back and quickly ran out of food and water.

Park rangers searching for the lost pair found them just four hours after Coughlin died.