SAN ANTONIO – The morning after the body of Lauren Bump, 24, was found along a jogging trail in O.P. Schnabel Park on New Year’s Eve 2013, the man on trial for her murder told his roommate he had “stuck” a woman with a knife the night before.
Christian Bautista, 31, is accused of stabbing Bump more than 20 times during an attack in the park.
“I asked him how the knife was doing,” Ryan O’Shea testified Monday as Bautista’s trial entered the second week. “He said ‘I stuck some {expletive} and had to get rid of it.”
O’Shea and Bautista shared a rundown mobile home in northwest San Antonio. He said he’d given Bautista an 8 inch combat knife just days before Bump was slain.
He testified that he initially dismissed Bautista’s remark about stabbing a woman.
“I blew it off, honestly,” he testified. “I thought he was trying to be how he normally acted. He usually acted tough like that.”
He said that when he learned of Bump’s murder, he went to police and told them of the conversation he had with Bautista.
“Once I found out that it was an innocent young woman, I didn’t want that to happen at all,” O’Shea said. “I’d rather him be locked up.”
If he is convicted Bautista is facing a maximum punishment of life in prison.
Testimony is expected to continue on Tuesday in Judge Jefferson Moore’s 186th District Court.