Hushiar Faris Sumo, a 46-year-old White man, was driving in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when a night near the casino corridor turned into something far darker than a traffic wreck. Officers were dispatched to the area of Sam’s Way and L’Auberge Boulevard after his vehicle left the roadway, cut into a wooded stretch, and slammed into a tree. He was the only person in the car.
As police moved in to render aid, they discovered the crash was only the last visible beat of the violence—Sumo had been shot.
He was taken by Acadian Ambulance to a local hospital, but the gunshot wound proved fatal. Authorities later said he succumbed to his injuries at 4:10 a.m. on Saturday, September 24, 2022, after the initial response the previous day. Detectives treated the case as a homicide from the outset, and investigators began pulling the thread backward from the wrecked car and the hidden gunshot to understand how the shooting unfolded inside a moving life.
As the investigation widened, detectives learned that, before the crash, Sumo and another man had left a local casino together in Sumo’s vehicle. Surveillance video and witness statements became central, and investigators said those leads put the suspect in the area immediately after the crash. The trail then pointed out of Louisiana: police said the suspect fled the city and returned to the Humble, Texas, area. On September 27, 2022, Lake Charles detectives obtained an arrest warrant for Eskinder Seyifu Mekuria of Humble, charging him with second degree murder.
On October 13, 2022, Lake Charles police detectives and SWAT coordinated with Houston authorities and tracked Mekuria down. He was apprehended without incident that afternoon in the 6500 block of Westheimer Road, booked into the Harris County Joint Processing Center, and held for extradition back to the Lake Charles area. Bond was set at $850,000. The case did not end at the arrest: prosecutors later said Mekuria met Sumo at the casino, left with him in Sumo’s car, and shot him while Sumo was driving. In September 2025, a Calcasieu Parish jury found Mekuria guilty of second degree murder, and on September 25, 2025, a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole under Louisiana law’s mandatory penalty for that conviction.
