SANTA CRUZ — A judge found a 20-year-old man charged with killing his UC Santa Cruz student girlfriend competent to stand trial during a hearing Wednesday.
Samuel Brannigan Stone, who also had attended UCSC through last semester, pleaded not guilty to a murder charge after the court received a psychiatric evaluation eliminating doubt of his mental capacity.
For Mansoor Naseem, news that his daughter’s alleged killer would continue through the legal process was a relief, he said in an interview after the hearing. Naseem’s daughter, Zainab Mansoor, 21, was found unconscious on Seabright State Beach shortly before 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 23. Stone himself had called 911 to report the incident, according to police.
The last time Naseem saw his daughter alive, he said, she was preparing to return to her business management studies at UCSC on Jan. 20. Mansoor had spent a small fortune stocking up on baking supplies so she could make cookies she would share at school, a tradition picked up in childhood when she would bake with her mother, Naseem said. He drove her back to Santa Cruz that night and the two shared dinner.
“She had the biggest heart. My son said, she would go out to lunch and she would spend everything,” Naseem said, two months after his daughter’s death. “She wouldn’t even care. She was not a miser, she was not cheap. She would give everything she had.”
While Mansoor was born in the Bay Area, she and her family spent the majority of her life living in New York City, only moving back to California during her junior year of high school.
“She was the most precious thing I had in my life, the day she was born until the day she passed,” said Naseem, a Bay Area software developer. “I’m the one who gave her the name Zainab and her last name is Mansoor, which is my first name. It’s a custom, it basically means, ‘Zainab, the daughter of Mansoor.’”
In childhood, Mansoor — the oldest of three children — became like a friend and adviser to her father, Naseem said. As Mansoor grew older, she would have passionate debates with her father about causes she championed wholeheartedly, he said. She also would help care for her two young brothers, tutor young students and reliably help with everything at home from cleaning up after dinner to copyediting the family’s work, Naseem said. He said his regrets over his daughter’s untimely death are manifold and even mundane. Spreading out a folder of vital documents including Mansoor’s birth and death certificates, he said all that was left of her was paper and that he feared a time when his memories of her would begin to fade.
Naseem said he never asked his daughter what her favorite color was, or if he could have her autograph. He did not know how much to water her many small plants, or what the story behind a rock left in her room was. So many conversations, he said, had been left unfinished and so many family vacations left undone.
“I lost my right hand,” Naseem said, adding that in his Indian Muslim culture, sons are often groomed as family’s top achievers. “She was not my son, she was my daughter… In the future, I only dreamt that my daughter was going to be the CEO. She was going to run everything.”