Man on trial for stabbing Marine 7 times in fatal attack

Marine's accused murderer claims self-defense, his girlfriend testifies against him
By Claire Galofaro
NOLA.com
The Times-Picayune
December 05, 2012

As Melvin Clay fled the French Quarter after stabbing a decorated Marine seven times on a street corner, he sideswiped a car parked a block away. The exterior cap of Clay's side-view mirror popped off, and he did not stop to collect it.

That mirror cap, a seemingly small piece of evidence found by detectives, was the only thing that would, a month later, connect Clay to the crime.

That Clay stabbed 23-year-old Sgt. Ryan Lekosky around 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 31, 2010 is not in question at his second-degree murder trial this week. He admits that he did. Only he claims self-defense -- that he was first attacked by Lekosky's wife. Frightened when her Marine husband intervened, he used his knife as a last resort.

"This is not a murder. This is not a manslaughter," his attorney, John Thomas, said in his opening statement Wednesday. "This is a man fighting for his life."

But prosecutors painted a very different picture of the moments leading up to the fatal stabbing.

Lekosky, a Texas native assigned to the Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse, had been to the Marine Corps Ball at the Marriott Hotel on Canal Street. He was walking around 3:30 a.m. with his wife near the corner of Iberville and Dauphine streets.

Clay, prosecutors said, hung out his window as he drove by the couple and shouted obscenities at Lekosky's wife. Clay put his car in park, despite a growing line of traffic behind him, and got out. He pushed the woman onto the sidewalk. The Marine, clad in his dress blues, helped his wife get up, then wedged his body between his wife and the stranger. In return, prosecutors say, Clay stabbed him seven times -- once in the cheek, another in the back and several more times in the chest.
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