Police are investigating the murder of Maleesa Mooney, inset. (Screenshots from Los Angeles station KABC/YouTube)
The Los Angeles Police Department on Wednesday announced the arrest of a 41-year-old Minnesota man in the death of a Los Angeles model found dead in the refrigerator of her apartment.
Cops identified the suspect as Magnus Daniel Humphrey of Hopkins, a suburb of Minneapolis. He’s accused of killing 31-year-old Maleesa Mooney and then bounding her hands and ankles and gagging her mouth before stuffing her in the refrigerator of her downtown Los Angeles apartment. Mooney’s mother, concerned for her well-being, called police on Sept. 12 after she hadn’t been seen for nearly a week and officers found her body.
Court filings on the federal docket in the Northern District of Illinois show that a judge issued an arrest warrant for Humphrey on July 20, nearly two months before he allegedly killed Mooney. The judge issued the warrant after he failed to show up to a court hearing, the docket shows. Humphrey was on probation for a 2017 conviction for distributing heroin, records show. A federal judge in Minnesota sentenced him to six years in prison and five years probation. Humphrey was released from federal custody in December 2021, but violated his probation in January 2023 and was arrested. He was released in May.
The docket says he was arrested in November and was in federal custody until Feb. 7 when Los Angeles authorities arrested him. LAPD said he waived an extradition hearing and was taken back to California.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Mooney was last seen on surveillance video in her luxury apartment building, Skye at Bunker Hill, on Sept. 6. Officers entered with a property manager’s key on Sept. 12 and found her body “wedged inside the refrigerator with pooled blood beneath it,” an autopsy obtained by Law&Crime said.
“Her wrists were bound together, her ankles were bound together and these bindings were tied to each other behind her back with miscellaneous electronic cords and clothing items,” the autopsy said. “Additional clothing items were around her face and neck. An apparent gag, fashioned out of an article of clothing, was stuffed in her mouth.”
She also suffered from blunt force injuries to her face, head, back and upper left arm. Those injuries are “generally not considered acutely life threatening on their own” but do indicate she was in a “violent physical altercation” before her death, medical examiners wrote. As for her cause of death, medical examiners say there is a “suspicion for homicidal asphyxia.” They don’t think the asphyxia was by strangulation but could have been through other means.
Toxicology reports also revealed Mooney had alcohol and cocaine in her system.
Family members were stunned by her death.
“When a week went by, we just knew something was off,” Bailey Babb, Mooney’s cousin, told local news station KTLA. “Her messages weren’t delivering, and we knew something was up because we all have a special relationship with Maleesa.”
Mooney’s sister, Jourdin Pauline, told the station she was “a peacemaker in our family, someone that’s always been the backbone, and making sure everyone’s getting together, loving on each other. So this is a really big piece of us that’s gone now.”
Pauline told local ABC affiliate KABC called her sister’s killer “demented.”
“To have someone do what they did to my sister, to that caliber, is sick.”
On Instagram, Pauline said her heart is crushed.
“This is so sick. I can’t believe my baby big sister is gone!!!!! The reason I’m me is because of you!!!”
Jason Kandel contributed to this report.
