The daughter of the nation’s first director of national intelligence was convicted of second-degree murder Thursday, the second time in three years a jury concluded that Sophia Negroponte stabbed her close friend inside a small Airbnb apartment in Rockville, Maryland.
Negroponte, 32, sat quietly as the verdict was announced and began dabbing her eyes. The conviction from the earlier trial had been overturned by a state appeals court.
Her parents, John and Diana Negroponte, were again in court to watch the proceedings. They sat quietly on the front row as the verdict was announced. A longtime diplomat, Negroponte, 86, was appointed to the DNI post in 2005.
Also in court Thursday, and just across the front-row aisle from the Negroponte’s, the parents of the 24-year-old victim, Yousuf Rasmussen, sat quietly as the verdict was announced. They seemed to show expressions of relief.
The case against Sophia Negroponte dates back nearly six years.
The evening of Feb. 13, 2020, she invited her close friend, Rasmussen, and a third person she’d recently met, Philip Guthrie, to come over for cocktails in the Airbnb where she was living. As the evening progressed, Negroponte and Rasmussen began arguing and even wrestling on the floor. What happened next has long been disputed.
Detectives and prosecutors asserted that Negroponte marched to the kitchen area of the tiny apartment, grabbed a chef-style knife, unsheathed it and attacked Rasmussen. She stabbed him several times, authorities say, including a strike to his lower neck that severed his carotid artery, a wound that was quickly fatal.
Negroponte’s attorneys have long said she wasn’t the initial aggressor and that in a night clouded by alcohol, she was tying to defend herself.
Police found the knife at the scene. Its total length was approximately eight inches.
Negroponte’s first trial ended in early 2023. A short time later, when Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Terrence McGann sentenced her to 35 years in prison, he made a point to share his impressions of Rasmussen. “What a wonderful young man he was,” McGann said. “Yousuf touched the lives of many, many people. He was kind, considerate, loyal, funny and very upbeat.”
More than two decades earlier, his parents, Zeba and Stephen Rasmussen, were living in the remote mountains of northeastern Pakistan, providing primary health care and support programs for poor villagers. They wanted very much to have a child of their own, and by then had turned to adoption, with Yousuf arriving to them suddenly two days after he came into the world.
“I just couldn’t believe this miracle that God had done for us,” Zeba Rasmussen said in court several years ago.
The family returned to the United States. Yousuf became a skilled soccer player and earned a college degree in health and fitness.
Sophia Negroponte was also adopted — from an orphanage in Honduras.
In 2024, the Appellate Court of Maryland tossed out her first guilty verdict because the jury was allowed to hear portions of an interrogation video showing police questioning Negroponte’s credibility and testimony from a prosecution expert witness who also questioned her credibility.
At her second trial, which began Nov. 3, defense attorneys introduced new DNA analysis that showed the victim’s DNA, not their client’s, was found on a knife sheath that itself was found on the kitchen floor. That suggested it was Rasmussen who first grabbed the knife and unsheathed it, the attorneys said, leading to a fight.
“There’s a scuffle back and forth. There’s a mutual fight,” defense attorney David Moyse said in closing arguments.
Jurors were shown photos of cutting injuries to the back of Negroponte’s hands. Moyse said they showed that she defended herself. Prosecutors said it showed the knife slipping in her hands as she attacked.
Prosecutors built their case heavily on the eyewitnesses testimony of the third person in the apartment, Guthrie, and called him as a witness on the first day of the trial.
“Yousuf and Sophia are yelling at each other, having an argument, really raising their voices,” Guthrie testified, recalling what he saw. “And then Sophia takes several quick steps from where she’s standing in the kitchen, opens a drawer, grabs a knife, pulls the sheath off the knife and then quickly moves back toward Yousuf holding the knife out in front of her toward Yousuf’s neck.”
In their closing arguments, prosecutors sought to bolster Guthrie’s credibility by highlighting positions he held.
“He had a job, a management job, managed a Starbucks. Takes responsibilities,” Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Hill said, adding that Guthrie refereed college soccer games, a position that requires close observation.
“You’re not supposed to miss calls.” Hills said. “You’re supposed to keep an eye on what is happening before you. He was trained for that.”
Unlike the two others in the apartment that night, Hill said, Guthrie hadn’t had much to drink: “I would submit to you that Philip was very sober, and especially stone-cold sober after what he saw.”
Another prosecutor, Donna Fenton, encouraged jurors — during their deliberations — to watch video from immediately after Rasmussen was stabbed. It was recorded by a body camera of a police officer who was called to the scene. It showed Negroponte hunched over Rasmussen, with one of her arms pressing a towel into his neck to try to stop the bleeding. “Yousuf, breathe!” Negroponte had said. “I’m so sorry.”
“What do you say you’re are sorry for?” Fenton asked the jurors. “The things you do. And that’s what she did. She’s guilty because she lunged and killed with two stabs and five cuts to Yousuf Rasmussen.”
Fenton also encouraged jurors to watch video of Negroponte’s interrogation by homicide detective Paula Hamill.
“Honestly I think that I was trying to shut him up and I just did something horribly wrong,” Negroponte said in the video.
“I have anger management problems,” Negroponte also said.
She never said she stabbed Rasmussen.
Prosecutors downplayed the significance of evidence showing Rasmussen’s DNA on the knife sheath. They suggested it could have gotten there by transfer DNA, meaning that Rasmussen’s DNA got on Negroponte earlier when they were wrestling, and she transferred it to the sheath. They also said he could have sneezed near the sheath.
In his closing arguments, Moyse, the defense attorney, took direct aim those possibilities, suggesting others as well.
“He could have shaken hands with Sophia, and then she could’ve touched it and magically only put his DNA on it,” Moyse said. “He could have licked an envelope, and she took the envelope and stuck it on the sheath. I don’t know. I could come up with things all day. But I’ll tell you this much: One of the reasonable explanations is it’s there because he touched it.”
The attorney began his closing argument by showing jurors a four-foot-high poster defining reasonable doubt. He said evidence at the scene — an off-kilter window air conditioner, toppled kitchen items, a lens from Rasmussen’s eye glasses — indicated there had been a fight in the kitchen area that Guthrie said he never saw.
“He is inaccurate,” Moyse said of the witness, adding to comments he made in opening statements when he called Guthrie flawed by his desire to help authorities: “It is understandable and well-intentioned, but he is wrong.”
He told jurors that when studying the videos of his client, they would see the anguish over what happened. And during Negroponte’s interview with the homicide detectives, Moyse said, her efforts to be honest were apparent by making statements that didn’t put her in a positive light. Negroponte said she remembered pulling the knife from Rasmussen’s neck, for example.
“It was not sophisticated. It was not helpful,” Moyse said.
And repeatedly, Negroponte told the detectives, she would never have killed her close friend. Had only there been a recording, Negroponte said, of what happened.
“I wish there was a frickin’ camera to see that I didn’t just take the knife and just stab him,” she said.
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