Man sentenced to prison in UC Berkeley student's 2020 death

A Berkeley man convicted of voluntary manslaughter was sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison for the 2020 fatal shooting of a 19-year-old UC Berkeley student, authorities said.

The student, Seth Smith, was identified after Berkeley police responded to a report of a person lying on a Dwight Way sidewalk near Valley Street on June 15, 2020. When police arrived, they found him suffering from a gunshot wound to the head. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene in the city's third homicide of that year.

Days later, authorities issued a $50,000 reward for information leading to a suspect's arrest in the death of Smith, a third-year student pursuing a double major in economics and history. Smith's mother told police she believed he had just gone out for a walk to clear his head that night.

Over time and through still-unspecified sources, investigators later developed information that led them to seek a warrant for the arrest of Tony Lorenzo Walker, 60, on Aug. 20, 2020. Officers arrested him that same day outside his residence on suspicion of multiple charges, including homicide, possession of a firearm by a felon, carrying a loaded firearm on one's person in a city and possession of ammunition by a prohibited person.

According to prior reporting by the Bay Area News Group, court documents showed Walker had at least 11 prior convictions in Alameda County, including several second-degree robberies, burglaries and a commercial burglary ranging from the 1970s to 1990s, an armed robbery in 1992, assault with a deadly weapon in 2001 and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person in 2016.

After the Alameda County District Attorney's Office charged him Aug. 24, 2020, Alameda County Superior Court records show Walker initially pleaded not guilty to an array of charges. But on May 2, he pleaded no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter, admitting also to a specific allegation of great bodily injury, as well as a second-degree robbery charge.

In a formal statement after his sentencing, Walker expressed remorse for the killing, a District Attorney's Office spokeswoman said Tuesday.