A state appeals court panel Thursday rejected a bid for re-sentencing by a man who pleaded no contest to setting fire to a Studio City music studio, killing two men and leaving a 15-year-old girl and a man in his 20s critically injured.
The three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal noted that Efrem Zimbalist Demery “never denied in his petition that he was the actual killer or that he acted alone” and that the prosecution charged him as the “sole and actual killer and he pleaded to those charges in order to avoid possible sentences of life without the possibility of parole.”
Demery, now 35, petitioned for re-sentencing in March 2023, less than two years after being sentenced to 50 years to life in state prison.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge denied the re-sentencing bid in March 2024, telling the defendant then that “You were the one who burned that building that caused the two people to die. You’re just not eligible for this relief,” according to the appellate court panel’s 10-page ruling.
Demery, a Los Angeles resident, pleaded no contest in July 2021 to two counts of murder, along with an arson charge.
Police said after the April 14, 2018, fire that Demery knew and had been together with the deceased victims — DeVaughn Cemar Carter, 28, and Michael Pollard Jr., 30, both of Los Angeles — and that a dispute erupted with one or both of them.
Demery then went across the street from Top Notch Recordings at 3779 N. Cahuenga Blvd., bought gas at a Chevron station and returned to torch the interior of the building before fleeing out a rear door, police said.
The fire was reported shortly before 7 a.m., and took crews about a half-hour to douse.
A K-9 on loan to the LAFD’s Arson/Counter-Terrorism Section from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detected an accelerant, and forensic evidence, surveillance video and witness statements caused investigators to zero in on Demery, police said.
Policle said Demery poured fuel in a hallway and set it ablaze, adding that Carter and Pollard were in one room and the two injured victims were in separate areas of the studio at the time.
Responding firefighters found all four victims down inside the building.
Carter and Pollard were pronounced dead at the scene and the two injured victims were hospitalized with “significant burns,” police said.
Demery was arrested that night in the area of 135th Street and Avalon Boulevard in the Willowbrook area when a California Highway Patrol officer stopped him for a traffic violation.