A Garfield man will serve at least six and a half years in prison for killing his landlord last year.
Michael Wolf, 50, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and possessing instruments of crime before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski in August.
Wolf was ordered to serve six and a half to 13 years in prison.
Matthew Khoury, 37, of Pittsburgh, was shot in the chest just after midnight on July 22, 2019, at a home in the 5100 block of Kincaid Street.
Police said in a criminal complaint that Wolf called 911 to report the shooting, saying that Khoury had gone after him with a stun gun.
The prosecution said the two had been arguing over back rent as part of a long-running landlord-tenant dispute.
Edie Khoury, the victim’s mother, described to the court holding her son as he lay dying in her arms. He was shot, she said, as he got a pizza out of the oven.
“I have never experienced something so horrific and being so helpless as seeing my son lying on my dining room floor in his underwear; his bare chest covered in so much blood that I thought he was stabbed and seeing his beautiful amber eyes roll up in his head as he died,” she wrote in her victim-impact statement. “My PTSD makes me still hear, see and even smell my son’s death almost every moment of my day and then at night when I am jolted awake after only a few hours of sleep by the memory of my son’s murder.”
Khoury’s family told the court that he was gay and spent much of his life being bullied by homophobic people.
