A jury on Friday convicted a man of the brutal 1993 killing of a woman outside Buffalo, closing the latest chapter in a winding, decades-long saga, with a swift guilty verdict on all counts.

The defendant, Brian Scott Lorenz, was facing his third trial for the murder of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student who walked into her Tonawanda, N.Y., home on a cold February afternoon and encountered a terror.

Ms. Meindl was murdered in her own dining room. She was strangled, stabbed and handcuffed, and her bloodied body was discovered by her young daughter returning home from school.

Mr. Lorenz, 56, was originally convicted of Ms. Meindl’s murder in 1994, alongside another man, James Pugh, though the two long denied any involvement in the killing. Their pleas of innocence eventually found the support of several legal advocates, defense lawyers from New York City, who lobbied for new DNA testing in the case.

That testing, performed in 2018, resulted in stunning findings: There was no genetic link to either Mr. Lorenz or Mr. Pugh at the crime scene. Nor was there any other physical evidence — like hair or fiber samples — or any eyewitnesses linking either man to Ms. Meindl’s murder.

Those DNA results, and evidence violations by prosecutors, led to the dismissal of the men’s convictions in 2023, though Erie County continued to pursue the prosecutions.

The case was a challenge: Many of the state’s witnesses from 1994, who said Mr. Lorenz had bragged about the crime, had died; others told investigators they did not remember details of their initial testimony. Still other witnesses had criminal records and, the defense said, were seeking deals for themselves.

A second trial of Mr. Lorenz last year ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. And in December, Mr. Pugh, 63, who had been released on parole after serving more than 25 years in prison, saw his charges dropped. But on Friday, Mr. Lorenz was again found guilty, after less than a full day of deliberation, on two counts of murder and a burglary charge.

The verdict, after two weeks of testimony and arguments in Buffalo, is a defining moment in a case that has perplexed and fascinated residents of Western New York and beyond.

And it was vindication for the Meindl family, represented in court by the victim’s sister, Lynne MacGill, and Ms. Meindl’s younger daughter, Lisa Payne.

During closing arguments on Wednesday, Ms. Payne wore a blouse that belonged to her mother and sat in the front row of the courtroom clutching a Mickey Mouse pillow that her older sister, Jessica, had used as a comfort while testifying in 1994. (Jessica Meindl, who discovered her mother’s body, struggled with addiction and died in 2020, at 37.)

Ms. Payne also carried a small silver spoon that Jessica had used as a reminder to stay sober, and wore rings from her parents around her neck, including the wedding ring her mother had on when she was killed. As the verdict was read, Ms. Payne nodded slightly while Mr. Lorenz sat placidly, just a few feet away. He faces sentencing on July 13.

After the verdict, the two family members thanked the Erie County district attorney, Michael J. Keane.

“This outcome is not just a legal victory: It is a testament to the persistence of truth and the unwavering commitment of dedicated public servants tasked with the pursuit of justice,” Mr. Keane said in a statement.

Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers said they planned to appeal. They had spent years building a case for exoneration, citing the lack of DNA evidence connecting Mr. Lorenz to the crime and the possibility of other suspects.

“It’s very, very scary,” said Ilann M. Maazel, one of Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers. “I think innocence should matter. I think the truth should matter.”

One of the initial suspects in the case was Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald Meindl, who had been having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worked with at a Taco Bell at the time of his wife’s killing. Before the murder, he had mentioned to a friend that he wanted to have his wife killed, though he later said he was joking.

But the defense suggested that Mr. Meindl was serious about finding someone to kill his wife, at one point playing audio of Mr. Meindl laughing with a friend — who was wearing a wire for the police — about his wife’s death. Mr. Meindl died in 2023, though he attended hearings about the case in 2021 and 2022.

In his summation, Earl Ward, a defense attorney, emphasized the lack of hard evidence.

“You have to ask yourself why there was none of Scott’s DNA in that house,” Mr. Ward said. “Because he wasn’t there.”

Deepening the mystery, DNA from an unknown person was found on some items used in the murder, including a knife and a necktie that was used to strangle Ms. Meindl. (The authorities in Erie County say they have not done additional testing to determine who that DNA belongs to because “the genetic material is insufficient for comparison.”)

One of the case’s lead investigators in the early 1990s, David Bentley, a Tonawanda detective, also came under scrutiny for seemingly feeding details to some witnesses. Even current prosecutors called his actions sloppy and inappropriate.

And Mr. Bentley had a close relationship with Richard Matt, a convicted killer from the Buffalo area who rose to infamy in 2015 when he and another inmate, David Sweat, escaped from a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Mr. Matt was killed by a federal agent after a three-week manhunt. Mr. Sweat was recaptured.

Then, during a re-investigation of the Meindl case brought on by the new DNA evidence, two Erie County prosecutors came to believe that Mr. Matt might have been involved in killing Ms. Meindl, a theory promoted by Mr. Sweat, himself a convicted killer who remains in prison. The judge in the case, Paul B. Wojtaszek, later discredited that theory, but nonetheless set aside Mr. Lorenz’s and Mr. Pugh’s convictions in 2023.

The dismissal of charges against Mr. Pugh in December and the lack of physical evidence seemed to lead to a shift in prosecutors’ strategy in the third trial; previously, they had argued that the two men had been burglarizing the Meindl home and killed Ms. Meindl to cover their tracks.

This time, prosecutors offered little in the way of motive, though a suggestion toward the end of their closing arguments that Mr. Lorenz might have killed Ms. Meindl for money drew an angry protest from the defense and a rebuke from Justice Wojtaszek. After the verdict on Friday, Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers suggested that those comments by the prosecutors could be part of their appeal.

The state’s case hinged on six associates of Mr. Lorenz who said he’d told them various details about the crime, and his involvement, back in the early 1990s. Several of those people have died, so their past testimony was read to the jury. Other witnesses for the prosecution had criminal records and troubled personal histories, including addiction and mental health issues.

The lead prosecutor in the case, Eugene T. Partridge III, conceded in his closing that “it would have been great had he confessed to a busload of nuns,” but argued that “those vulnerabilities is the reason the defendant chose them.”

Mr. Partridge also defended the long pursuit of a conviction in the case, saying “there is no expiration date on justice.”

The jury’s foreperson, Cindy Musacchio, 61, a retiree living in Tonawanda, said that prosecutors’ compilation of various statements attributed to Mr. Lorenz had swayed her.

“All the people he confessed to, all the similarities, I felt was compelling,” she said, after leaving the jury room.

For her part, Ms. Payne said in a statement that while “nothing in this world could ever justify the brutal death of my mother,” the verdict “shows that as flawed as our justice system is, it can still provide a little piece of comfort.”

“May she now finally be able to rest in peace,” she wrote.

Jonah E. Bromwich and Mark Sommer contributed reporting.

Derrick Sanders feared that if he did not return to the corners of Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood, more bodies would drop.

Mr. Sanders had been a street outreach worker for the Offender Alumni Association. But he was laid off in late 2025 after the organization lost $1.5 million in federal funds and was disbanded. Then, murders surged.

There were four killings the next month, Mr. Sanders said — all deaths he believes were preventable. One of the victims had been a participant in the Offender Alumni Association, the program where Mr. Sanders worked to de-escalate conflicts and mentor people at risk of committing violence. He had engaged regularly with two of the other victims in the community.

“When we were there to mediate situations, they would listen — we come to an agreement,” he said. “But when we left, that agreement left with us.”

After violent crime worsened alongside Covid-19, the federal government passed legislation including hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for community violence interventions. Community leaders and experts on crime nationwide gave some credit to these programs for helping bring homicides to historic lows in the years since. But the Trump administration withheld much of this funding upon taking office in 2025, leaving many programs scrambling to find alternative sources of support and community leaders uncertain if they can sustain the progress.

Violence prevention programs began taking root in America after lethal violence skyrocketed in the early 1990s. A new idea began to take shape in cities around the country: Treat violence like a disease, and combat it with public health techniques.

“The first step is to interrupt the transmission,” said Kwame Thompson, a violence interrupter with Stand Up to Violence in the Bronx for 11 years. Then, intervene with people in the community who are at high risk of perpetuating violence. “We identify them,” Mr. Thompson said, “and we work to help change their norms.”

Local governments and philanthropists funded pilots in cities such as Chicago and Boston, which were largely led by grass-roots organizations focused on providing resources to vulnerable individuals.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, homicide rates nationwide gradually but significantly fell from their heights in the 1990s.

Then, violence surged again during the Covid-19 pandemic. Community groups pushed to get relief funds for violence prevention and intervention strategies. With the passage of the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, programs around the country could apply for federal funds. By 2023, the Biden administration had created a national Office of Gun Violence Prevention and invested more than $42 billion, according to Gregory Jackson, a former deputy director of the office.

With the federal support, states and municipalities established violence prevention offices, augmenting the work of police departments with programs focused on street outreach, hospitals, schools and other community pillars.

“The goal was truly to build out the prevention work,” said Rob Wilcox, a former deputy director of the White House’s now-shuttered Office of Gun Violence Prevention, adding that the funds would also help law enforcement personnel solve homicides and provide support for victim services. “That’s such a new and expansive way to think about how we address this crisis.”

Since 2022, the steep drop in homicides across the country gave credence to the effectiveness of the newly robust violence prevention paradigm. In 2025, Baltimore experienced its lowest homicide rate in 50 years. Los Angeles experienced a nearly 20 percent drop in homicides, which Mayor Karen Bass said was driven by the city’s “comprehensive approach to public safety.”

But researchers have struggled to empirically tie these improvements directly to the programs.

“The community violence intervention is so much about developing relationships with people who understandably distrust almost anybody coming to knock at the door,” said Shani A.L. Buggs, advisory chair at the Black & Brown Collective for Community Solutions to Gun Violence. “How you measure that kind of change is challenging, and that’s something that the field is still figuring out.”

Despite the constraints, some research supports the idea that these approaches can be cost-effective. A study by the University of California, Berkeley, found that for every dollar a prevention program called Advance Peace spent on intervention, cities in California that implemented the program saved more than $18 in spending on law enforcement, emergency services and other shooting-related costs. Another study produced by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health linked Baltimore’s Safe Streets program to a 32 percent reduction in homicides, finding that every dollar invested in the program had averted $7 to $19 in costs.

“I do believe that a lot of these programs have an effect, but we have to contend with the fact that the evidence is really weak for these programs on their own,” said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. “The evidence is strong for citywide strategies that contain these programs.”

Interventions can also be victims of their own success — less violence can mean less urgency to spend money on preventing it.

“You got to have support from local officials,” said Rodney McIntosh, a violence prevention worker in Fort Worth. “We know we save lives, but yet we have to fight every year just to be a part of the public safety ecosystem.”

Now, sweeping funding cuts at the federal level are hindering support for community violence interventions. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice said the department is “committed to directly supporting law enforcement and victims to improve public safety and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

Some federal funds are still available, but they are scarce and require recipients to work with immigration enforcement officers, conditions that are deal breakers for some.

“Programs that were actively preventing shootings are now paused or dismantled,” said Monique Williams, chief executive officer of Cure Violence Global. “You have trained staff who are now laid off and trusted relationships in neighborhoods that are now broken.”

Programs that have managed to overcome cuts are leaning more heavily on local resources for support. Some cities and states have stepped in to make up for the shortfall, but the amount of federal funding that was lost is difficult to match.

With the funding cuts have come fears that violence could surge again.

“Violence prevention is important because of the human costs,” said Elinore Kaufman, a professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and the medical director of a hospital-based violence intervention program. “I do expect that we’ll see increases in harm, increase in injury, increase in death, because we are taking away these essential supports that have proven beneficial.”

In Atlanta, Mr. Sanders and his team used to be a visible force in the English Avenue neighborhood, easily spotted in their purple T-shirts.

After the spate of violence that followed his program’s closure, Mr. Sanders stopped searching for another full-time job, took on part-time work and spent his free time with one of his former co-workers, trying to prevent more fighting. He said he would rather continue his intervention work unpaid than step away from the neighborhood.

“We were a daily reminder of ‘Hey, man, you don’t got to do it like that’ — it don’t take a gun to settle every situation,” Mr. Sanders said. “But now that reminder is gone.”

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.

Outside a Sikh temple in the Little Punjab section of Queens, hundreds of people lined up around the block, waiting to receive plates of hot chickpea curry and deep-fried bhatura bread. It was the third Sunday in April, and the temple had prepared thousands of meals to celebrate the Indian harvest festival Vaisakhi.

Inside, the local assemblywoman, Jenifer Rajkumar, who had traded her signature red dress for one in harvest yellow, was working the crowd.

“Who here likes to have a Punjabi representative in office?” she asked the congregants, referring to herself. About half of them raised their hands.

Ms. Rajkumar registered faint disapproval. Everyone should raise their hands, she said, because “as a community, we have never been more powerful.”

She had a point. Last November, many of the people in the room had helped elect Zohran Mamdani as the first South Asian American to become the mayor of New York City. But as Ms. Rajkumar seeks another term in office, her race may test whether this community’s support of Mr. Mamdani was rooted more in identity or ideology.

Her Democratic primary opponent, David Orkin, is a democratic socialist who is also courting the mayor’s supporters, and earlier that afternoon, he had also visited the temple. He was accompanied by an entourage of progressive South Asian volunteers who helped to ingratiate him with the local community.

Ms. Rajkumar, who had brought her mother along, gave an impassioned speech; Mr. Orkin helped make the festival’s bread.

The June primary contest has grown fractious, with each candidate accusing the other of election fraud and Mr. Orkin recently suing to kick Ms. Rajkumar off the ballot. The primary may also be a measure of the Democratic Socialists of America’s growing momentum in New York.

Mr. Orkin is the first Democrat to primary Ms. Rajkumar, the incumbent, since she won her seat in 2020, when she and Mr. Mamdani made history as the first South Asian Americans elected to the State Assembly.

But this year, the same progressive South Asian and Indo-Caribbean networks that helped elect Mr. Mamdani as mayor are trying to rally an energized South Asian electorate around Mr. Orkin, potentially dividing voters in Queens who might otherwise gravitate toward backing Ms. Rajkumar.

Mr. Orkin, an anti-Zionist Jew, has now become a familiar figure at South Asian temples and community events in Queens, being squired about by members of DRUM Beats, the political arm of Desis Rising Up & Moving, and the newly formed Hindus for Human Rights Action.

“During Ramadan I probably went to like eight iftars,” Mr. Orkin said. “Every Friday, I’m going to masjid and doing jummah prayer, and then I think we’re gonna get into a practice of, every Sunday, going to a gurudwara.”

Andrew Singh, an Indo-Caribbean DRUM Beats organizer who lives around the block from Ms. Rajkumar’s office, spends much of his free time phone-banking for Mr. Orkin and introducing him to congregants at local temples, so as to “not let the identity politics get in the way,” he said.

Ms. Rajkumar is running on more than her identity. She came to office after serving as the state’s first director of immigration affairs under Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, where she created a $31 million fund to provide legal services for immigrants.

As a second-term lawmaker, she successfully championed legislation in 2023 that made Diwali — a festival observed by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists — a public school holiday in New York, an achievement noted by many people interviewed for this article.

More recently, Ms. Rajkumar gained broader attention for her frequent and often perplexing appearances at news conferences and events held by Eric Adams, Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor as mayor. She also unsuccessfully ran for public advocate last year, losing to the incumbent, Jumaane Williams, by more than 50 percentage points in the Democratic primary.

Ms. Rajkumar has always said that her Indian parents’ rags-to-riches journey was what inspired her to work in government. Her family was one of millions that had been dispossessed during the 1947 Partition of India, and her parents, both doctors, “came to America with $300 and a suitcase.”

Her back story, as well as her work in the Legislature, has earned the respect and continued support from members of the Bangladeshi American Society, including many who also backed Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy.

“The vote that we did with Mamdani is totally different,” explained Mohammad Ali, the head of the Bangladeshi American Society. He and a dozen other local leaders who have supported Ms. Rajkumar said that they voted for Mr. Mamdani not because of his socialist platform, but, at least in part, because they felt they knew him.

Mr. Ali characterized Ms. Rajkumar as “a true friend to our community.”

But her track record has failed to impress DRUM Beats, whose leaders say she has not meaningfully delivered for her working-class constituents.

“Vast parts of the community know that she is just like every other politician,” said Simran Thind, a Punjabi organizer who recently took Mr. Okrin to two Sikh temples during Vaisakhi. “She shows up, she says a few words in our language and she leaves.”

The organization’s executive director, Fahd Ahmed, said that, early on, it had been willing to try to work with Ms. Rajkumar. Then the assemblywoman formed a close alliance with Mr. Adams, and any hope that they could reconcile their differences evaporated.

“It just reinforced what we were already assessing her to be: pro-police, pro-real estate, pro-corporation, highly focused on personal relationships,” Mr. Ahmed said.

Ms. Rajkumar defended her relationship with Mr. Adams, saying that she “got to be involved in every single issue in this city,” adding, “everyone saw me everywhere.”

It was also a practical calculation, she said, allowing her to “deliver for my constituents in ways they had never been delivered for before,” like making Diwali a school holiday. She compared her appearances with Mr. Adams to Mr. Mamdani’s visits to the Trump White House.

Some left-leaning groups remain dubious.

In March, Mr. Orkin, 34, met with progressive organizers at Saar Indian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, where he chatted over masala coated canapés and happily accepted the endorsement of Hindus for Human Rights Action.

The posters decorating the walls of the restaurant championed “A Free Palestine,” but the Hindu group, which has modeled itself after Jewish Voice for Peace Action, aims to fight right-wing Hindu nationalism in the Indian diaspora.

The group’s political director, Ria Chakrabarty, explained that its decision to endorse Mr. Orkin was motivated by its distrust of Ms. Rajkumar. Since 2020, Ms. Rajkumar has been accused — including by Mr. Mamdani — of welcoming right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology into her orbit, by accepting campaign donations from people and groups supportive of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (Ms. Rajkumar and the Coalition of Hindus of North America have characterized those accusations as discriminatory for singling out the Hindu donors of a Hindu politician.)

“Five years ago, she might not have been as unpalatable,” Ms. Chakrabarty said. “But this is, for us, a moment of real clarity.”

When Mr. Orkin addressed the gathering that night at Saar, he acknowledged the seeming incongruity of his own presence.

“Probably to some of you I am just a random white guy,” he said. But as a longstanding member of Jewish Voice for Peace, he said he was also someone who could understand the perspective of the progressive Hindus and noted the importance of “speaking out against Hindu nationalism and its very obvious connections to Zionism.”

A resident of Ridgewood, in the district’s more liberal northern enclave, Mr. Orkin spent the last three years working as a staff attorney at the immigrant-advocacy nonprofit Make the Road New York. He is openly gay, Jewish, Mexican on his mother’s side, and speaks fluent Spanish. He got the idea to run for office last July, after campaigning for Mr. Mamdani, and his background was appealing enough to DRUM Beats that the group endorsed him on Day 1 of his campaign.

Amit Pratap Shah, a leader of the Ridgewood Nepalese Society, said that “at a very grass-roots level, when it comes to support, we have to first look at who can be the best candidate for our community.” He said that he voted for Mr. Mamdani and supported Ms. Rajkumar, but added that his Nepali cultural center welcomes diverse voices and “it’s up to our community members to decide what they want to support.”

At the moment, Mr. Shah said, he thought that Ms. Rajkumar was the favorite because “people know her.” Then he reconsidered. Mr. Orkin, he allowed, “also visited our community center.”