Exterminator Convicted in Center City Doctor’s Death

Jason Smith’s picture is shown to the media during a 2013 press conference about the murder charge he faced. | AP

A Bucks County man has been convicted of killing a Center City doctor in her home two years ago.

Dr. Melissa Ketunuti, 35, was a physician and researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Jason Smith, a Bucks County exterminator, was the last person known to have visited her home, the day she died in January 2013.

Closing arguments had just been held on Tuesday.

“I remember the day that Dr. Melissa Ketunuti was killed. Not as a prosecutor, but as a woman and as a citizen of this city,” prosecutor Jennifer Selber told the jury, according to the Daily News. “I remember it as the day we stopped feeling safe.”

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, were left to contend with Smith’s apparent confession to the crime.

“Defense lawyer Michael Farrell began Tuesday with a quote that he put up on a screen that read: ‘Innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit,'” CBS Philly reports.

The jury found prosecutors more convincing. Smith was found guilty of first-degree murder and faces a possible sentence of life in prison. [CBS Philly]