Inset left: Adrian Echevarria (Orange County Sheriff's Office). Inset right: Bami Carmane (Obituary). Background: The rural road leading to the cabin where Echevarria killed Carmane in Vidor, Texas (Google Maps).
A Texas man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for killing a woman he met on a dating app, who then befriended him and offered him a new lease on life after his release from prison.
On Thursday, Adrian Echevarria, 49, was found guilty by an Orange County jury on one count of murder for the August 2025 death of 61-year-old Bami Elizabeth Carmane.
Working quickly, the court moved forward with the sentencing phase. The jurors came back to sentence the defendant to life in prison.
The underlying incident occurred on Aug. 21, 2025, at a residence on Foxglove Drive in Vidor, a small town located on the far eastern edge of the Lone Star State near the border with Louisiana.
Deputies arrived that day in response to a report about an unresponsive woman and determined that Carmane had not died of natural causes, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Office.
Echevarria was quickly identified as a person of interest in the case, arrested, and subsequently indicted for the victim's murder, according to a report at the time by The Beaumont Enterprise.
During the trial, prosecutors showed that Echevarria met Carmane through an online dating app while he was incarcerated in federal prison, according to a courtroom report by Beaumont-based ABC and NBC affiliate KBMT. That prior conviction is what put Echevarria on law enforcement's radar; his initial interview and arrest stemmed from parole violations. After his release on Aug. 20, the defendant was offered a place to stay by the victim, according to The Examiner, a weekly paper published in Beaumont.
The very next day, Carmane was dead, according to a courtroom report by CBS, The CW Plus and Fox affiliate KFDM.
Prosecutors explained that Echevarria had a contraband cellphone in prison and largely communicated with Carmane via Facebook. Upon his release, she allowed him to stay on her business property.
"He was in a position where he could have turned his life around from a really dark place and had the best help in the world doing that," the victim's son told KFDM. "How you could fumble something like that, the opportunity to make such a good life for yourself and then to take someone away from everyone else's lives is beyond me."
Carmane's family said the woman's openness and kind nature were what led the killer to his victim in the first place.
"This trial is in no way any part of the definition of who Bami Carmane was," a prosecutor told KBMT. "[She] was a free spirit, someone who loved to travel, someone who loved to have fun with her family and her friends. She was so important in so many people's lives."
The family said they want Carmane remembered for her love of travel, nature and music, and her compassion for animals and all other creatures. In a recent interview, her son said he finds her "more multifaceted, and more interesting and amazing" by the day after sifting through her personal items from the attic and a storage unit.
By the end of the trial, she was important to the jury as well.
Each time the jurors announced their verdicts, they did so in unison, standing together, KFDM reported.
After the trial, the jury collectively declared the killer guilty. After the sentencing phase, they took only 15 minutes to issue a life sentence.
"He had every bit of it coming to him," prosecutor Krispen Walker Winfree told KFDM. "The jurors gave it right to him."
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