Inset left: Adrian Echevarria (Orange County Sheriff’s Office). Inset right: Bami Carmane (Obituary). Background: The rural road leading to the cabin where Echevarria killed Carmane in Vidor, Texas (Google Maps).
A Texas man has been sentenced to life in prison for killing a woman he met through a dating app—someone who later became his friend and offered him a place to live after his release from prison.
An Orange County jury on Thursday convicted Adrian Echevarria, 49, of murdering 61-year-old Bami Elizabeth Carmane in August 2025.
Jurors then proceeded directly to sentencing and returned a life-in-prison sentence for Echevarria.
The killing took place on Aug. 21, 2025, at a home on Foxglove Drive in Vidor, a small community in eastern Texas near the Louisiana border.
Deputies went to the property after receiving a report of an unresponsive woman. Investigators determined Carmane had not died from natural causes, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.
Echevarria was soon identified as a person of interest, arrested and later indicted on a murder charge, according to an earlier report from The Beaumont Enterprise.
At trial, prosecutors said Echevarria met Carmane on an online dating app while serving time in federal prison, according to courtroom coverage from Beaumont-based ABC and NBC affiliate KBMT. His criminal history first drew authorities’ attention, while his initial interview and arrest were connected to parole violations. After he was released on Aug. 20, Carmane gave him somewhere to stay, The Examiner, a Beaumont weekly newspaper, reported.
Carmane was dead the following day, according to trial coverage by CBS, The CW Plus and Fox affiliate KFDM.
Prosecutors said Echevarria had possessed a contraband cellphone in prison and primarily kept in touch with Carmane through Facebook. Once he was released, she permitted him to live on her business property.
“He was in a position where he could have turned his life around from a really dark place and had the best help in the world doing that,” Carmane’s son told KFDM. “How you could fumble something like that, the opportunity to make such a good life for yourself and then to take someone away from everyone else’s lives is beyond me.”
Carmane’s family said her generosity and willingness to welcome others ultimately brought her into Echevarria’s orbit.
“This trial is in no way any part of the definition of who Bami Carmane was,” a prosecutor told KBMT. “[She] was a free spirit, someone who loved to travel, someone who loved to have fun with her family and her friends. She was so important in so many people’s lives.”
Her loved ones said they want Carmane remembered for her passion for travel, nature and music, along with her compassion for animals and other living things. Her son recently said that sorting through belongings from her attic and a storage unit has made him see her as “more multifaceted, and more interesting and amazing” with each passing day.
By the trial’s conclusion, Carmane’s story had also made a lasting impression on the jury.
KFDM reported that the jurors stood together and announced each of their verdicts in unison.
The panel found Echevarria guilty, then deliberated for only 15 minutes before deciding he should spend the rest of his life in prison.
“He had every bit of it coming to him,” prosecutor Krispen Walker Winfree told KFDM. “The jurors gave it right to him.”
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