A divided New Orleans jury on Thursday convicted a man of manslaughter in a fatal shooting under the Seabrook Bridge, one of three homicides that have been linked to him since 2007.

Jurors voted 10-2 to convict Darnell Braud in the 2017 slaying of Peter Oatis Jr., which prosecutors said happened after the aspiring educator met his killer on a dating app.

Braud, 28, was convicted of obstruction of justice and being a felon in possession of a firearm by the same 10-2 margin.

The jury deliberated for more than five hours before finding him guilty of manslaughter rather than second-degree murder, as charged.

He faces up to 40 years on the manslaughter count at a Sept. 30 sentencing before Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Franz Zibilich. District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office said it will seek to increase Braud’s sentence even more by deeming him a habitual offender.

Louisiana voters last year decided to require unanimous verdicts in serious felony cases, but only for crimes occurring on or after Jan. 1 of this year.  

Oatis, 22, was found shot in a desolate area underneath the New Orleans East side of the bridge over the Industrial Canal on Nov. 2, 2017. Authorities believe his body had been there for hours before it was discovered.

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The case stayed dormant for months until Braud fell under suspicion in the May 24, 2018, shooting of another man in the Leonidas neighborhood. Investigators then connected Braud’s DNA to biological material found on Oatis’ body and underneath his fingernails.

At a trial that began last week and continued into this week, prosecutors built a circumstantial case that relied on that DNA evidence, phone records and surveillance video from the Mid-City area where Oatis’ car was set on fire. No eyewitnesses took the stand.

Oatis was gay. Braud’s phone contained evidence that he had sex with men and used gay dating apps. Phone records showed that the two men had a 28-second telephone call about 1:13 a.m. on the day of Oatis’s death.

Prosecutors said surveillance video and phone records showed that Braud was later in the area near Tulane and Carrollton avenues where Oatis’ car was burned. Meanwhile, they said, DNA, especially that of Braud found under Oatis’ fingernails, proved the two men had had close contact.

“Peter Oatis Jr. fought for his life,” Assistant District Attorney Inga Petrovich said in her closing statement. “Something happened — whether it was a sexual act, a sexual assault, a fight, a struggle, something happened to put that much of the defendant’s DNA under the palms of Peter Oatis and underneath one set of his fingernails.”

Petrovich and Assistant District Attorney Mike Trummel claimed that Braud destroyed Oatis’ phone in an attempt to obscure the fact that they had met on a dating app hours before Oatis’ death.

However, defense attorneys Lena Hinton and Walker Rick of the Orleans Public Defenders said the DNA was less definitive than the state suggested. They argued that it could have come from a glancing contact between the two men, not a violent fight.

“This is a highly circumstantial case. The state doesn’t want to admit that, but it is,” Hinton said in her closing statement. “There’s no witnesses, no video, no time of death, no answers. Even the DNA is circumstantial, because it doesn’t place Darnell Braud under the bridge or say he killed Peter Oatis.”

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Braud, who did not testify, still faces trial on first-degree murder in the May 2018 killing of 25-year-old Jarivas Jarrow.

That killing happened a little more than a year after his release from custody in the 2007 slaying of 18-year-old Warren Martin. Braud was still a teenager when he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in that homicide and received a 12-year sentence from a judge. He served nine years before his release in April 2017. He remained on parole at the time of both subsequent killings.