MANDEL: Fate of entitled couple Lucy Li and Oliver Karafa in jury's hands (2024)

Lucy Li is a rich girl social-media darling who loved to pose with her two sisters in scanty bikinis and lingerie as one of the “Miaa triplets.” Based on her numerous posts, it appears that she’s had a lot of plastic surgery.

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Husband Oliver Karafa killed a friend while driving drunk in a Land Rover when he was 19 and while serving his five-year sentence was bumped up to medium security on suspicion he was using a girlfriend and his sister to help him smuggle drugs and smokes into Beaver Creek Institution.

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Together, this entitled pair became known as the “Millennial Bonnie and Clyde,” international fugitives on the run from a bloody murder scene who were soon under arrest for first-degree murder and attempted murder.

After almost seven weeks, a Hamilton jury is now sequestered to determine if the photogenic couple is responsible for the planned execution of a Vancouver drug dealer and his pregnant girlfriend in a deserted industrial parking lot in Stoney Creek on Feb. 28, 2021.

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If the allegations are true, you’ve got to be especially cold-hearted to plan the murder of someone you knew was having a baby.

Karafa did not testify at this trial; however, through his lawyer Peter Zaduck, Karafa, 31, has admitted he shot and killed Tyler Pratt, 39, and fired at Jordyn Romano, but insisted the gunfire erupted following an angry meeting that got out of control and it wasn’t premeditated.

Li, 28, is not standing by her man. Or his story.

She’s testified that while they were on the lam in Hungary, her hubby confessed that he’d planned to murder the couple because he couldn’t return the half-million dollars Pratt had invested in his European PPE scheme or the millions he expected in profits and he was afraid of what the well-connected drug dealer would do when he found out.

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Li, of course, maintained she’d known nothing about what he was planning. Why, she said she hardly knew the couple. The daughter of prominent businesswoman Hong Wei “Winnie” Liao explained that she didn’t like to associate with those kind of people.

It’s only a miracle she and her hubby are facing one murder rap and not two. Romano, 26, was supposed to die that day, hit point-blank in the chest as she sat trying to get warm in her luxury Range Rover after she and Pratt were allegedly lured that winter afternoon to the industrial site to look at a potential factory for a joint grow-op.

One of the three bullets hit her in the heart and the trauma caused the loss of her unborn child.

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Despite Karafa and Li circling the scene several times in the Rover they stole from Romano, she managed to crawl away and be rescued and then return to court three years later to testify against the couple she thought weren’t just new business associates, but friends.

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After three and a half months on the run, the couple was arrested in Budapest in June 2021. Li waived extradition — mommy offered to fly her and the arresting officer back on a private plane — and managed to be freed on a bail of $2.7 million in January 2022 under several conditions, including wearing an electronic ankle monitor and remaining at her family’s North York home.

Just over a year later, Li was back in custody for allegedly breaching one of her conditions.

Karafa fought extradition and lost. He knew what awaited him.

In 2014, he was found guilty of impaired driving causing the death of his friend David Chiang, 24, in Toronto. Karafa, 19 at the time, was speeding and driving with more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood when he slammed the luxury SUV into a pole on Mount Pleasant Rd.

In addition to his five years in prison, Karafa was also handed a 15-year driving ban — and that’s why Li had to be his chauffeur.

Now he’s admitted to being a killer — but only to being guilty of second-degree murder and not first — while his pretty wife is hoping he goes down alone and she can get back to her life.

The posts are just not the same on TikTok when the triplets are just two.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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