OAKLAND — An East Palo Alto man has accepted a 9-year prison term and involuntary manslaughter conviction after prosecutors failed to convince a jury he was guilty of murder in a 2021 beating death, court records show.
Joshua Stroman, 38, pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and assault in the death of 40-year-old Kenyon Graham. He was sentenced to prison in mid-April, court records show. The plea deal came less than a month after Stroman’s murder trial, where jurors acquitted him of first-degree murder but failed to reach a verdict on charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter.
At the trial, Stroman’s lawyer argued that the killing wasn’t murder, but involuntary manslaughter.
Graham was found dead with massive head trauma at about 12:44 a.m. on Dec. 13, 2021. Police later learned Stroman beat him with a skateboard as he slept on the ground in the 500 block of 45th Street near Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland, authorities said.
After the beating, Stroman called 911 to report the incident, but painted himself as a passerby, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo.
“There’s a gentleman who’s laid right beside that bank underneath some type of wet blanket. I think he needs medical attention,” Stroman allegedly told the 911 dispatcher, just minutes after the beating. “He’s not moving, and he appears to be a little purple.”
During a police interview three days later, Stroman claimed that Graham had sexually abuse him before, and denied that he intended to kill or even seriously hurt Graham. Rather, he told police that it was “merely to get his attention and provoke a reaction so that they could talk,” Oakland police Detective Gerald Moriarty said at Stroman’s preliminary hearing.
In the more than two years between Stroman’s arrest and the trial, his case was delayed when he was briefly found mentally incompetent to stand trial, but criminal proceedings resumed after his competency was deemed restored, court records show.
