A 27-year-old Texas man was sentenced to 50 years in prison after being sentenced this week for fatally shooting a tattoo artist in 2016, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said.
Abdul-Rahman Khan was convicted for the murder of 33-year-old Peter Pina, a tattoo artist at the Electric Chair Tattoo and Piercing shop on Richmond on June 14, 2016.
The shooting occurred when Khan went to Pina’s shop for a tattoo at night. Khan was there for less than an hour and eventually went into an employee-only back room where equipment is sterilized. Pina and another employee told him to leave the room, which had piercing needles, tattoo equipment and biological waste. When Khan refused, Pina’s co-worker grabbed the defendant by the arm to escort him out the back door, the DA’s Office said in a release Saturday.
While being kicked off, Khan pulled a pistol out of his pocket and shot Pina in the chest. Another tattoo artist and a customer were able to get the gun away from Khan. They held him there until Houston police officers arrived.
Pina died at the scene.
Assistant District Attorney Stacy Scofield, a chief prosecutor who handled the case with ADA Keegan Childers, said Pina’s three sons now have to grow up without a father.
“Mr. Pina was a hardworking man who had custody of his three sons and was taking care of them,” Scofield said in the release. “He went to work at one of his three jobs and never came home again because Mr. Khan murdered him.”
Scofield said Khan has several charges pending in Dallas, including an allegation that he pulled a gun on a police officer. After he was charged with Pina’s murder and arrested, Khan was freed on bail and went to Dallas. While there, he was thrown out of a bar in Deep Ellum and pulled a gun out on a homeless man and local business owner, according to the DA’s Office.
When the police arrived to detain Khan, he is seen on a Dallas police officer’s body-worn camera pointing a gun directly at her at chest level. He then points at another officer and tries to run away while pointing his gun at the officers.
The jurors who sentenced Khan saw the body-worn video and heard testimony from a Dallas police officer about the case.
“The victim, in this case, was moments away from leaving for the night when the defendant came in and started trouble,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in the release. “While another employee began to remove the defendant from the shop, the defendant started shooting. Because of his actions, a family lost a loved one and the gunman will spend decades in prison.”
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