This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A Monday sentencing hearing was delayed for a 45-year-old Utah man convicted of shooting his wife in the head as he was driving.
In September, a jury found Komasquin Lopez guilty of first-degree felony murder after a week-long trial, where the defendant testified and told jurors that he believed his wife accidentally shot herself on Dec. 27, 2013.
He was expected to be in a 3rd District courtroom on Monday for sentencing, but the hearing was delayed because he was not transported from the Davis County jail, where he is being held, due to a clerical mix-up. A new sentencing date was set for Dec. 18.
During the trial, Lopez cried as he told jurors that he never held a gun to Shannon Lopez's ear and claimed that she shot herself.
"To this day, I think it's an accident," he said. "… She didn't kill herself."
Komasquin Lopez said that his wife had come to pick him up from work that day, and he immediately was upset with her because she was high on methamphetamine. He said they had agreed to use the drugs only on weekends, and that Shannon Lopez initially began using it just to lose weight.
He began to drive their truck home, he said, and as he approached a left-turn lane at the intersection of State Street and 7800 South, he testified that he told his wife that she was a "meth whore and I was going to leave her."
"I hit the gas and started turning left," he testified. "Then I hear a loud noise, BAM. I'm thinking she broke the window. I look to the right, I started screaming, 'Shannon! Shannon!' … There was blood everywhere."
The husband said he never saw a gun and didn't see Shannon Lopez put the gun to her head.
But prosecutors argued at trial that it didn't make sense for Shannon Lopez to kill herself when she was happy and had two children.
"We don't know why [he killed her]," Deputy Salt Lake County District Attorney Langdon Fisher told jurors. "If it was something she said that was the final straw. We don't know if he just got carried away because he was so mad and [squeezed] the trigger too tight. Maybe it was just muscle confusion, trying to threaten her and drive at the same time."
Utah Medical Examiner Todd Grey told jurors that whoever shot the gun had pressed the gun hard against Shannon Lopez's left ear before firing. But he said he could not determine whether the death was a homicide or a suicide.
Just after the gun was fired inside Lopez's pickup, his vehicle crashed into another.
As police began investigating the accident and Shannon Lopez's death, they were suspicious of her husband and his inconsistent stories of what happened in the cab of the truck. He was charged with murder several weeks after her death.