BATON ROUGE — The trial of the man who killed her daughter ended last Friday, but Misha Hobbs tells UWK that she has more work to do.
A jury convicted Cedrick Lang of negligent homicide in her daughter Christina Hobbs’ death and of manslaughter in the death of Racheal Johnson. The women were killed in the same apartment seven months apart. Lang was also convicted of obstruction of justice in Hobbs’ death.
“I’m very angry,” Misha Hobbs said Monday. “I’m very angry at the system.”
Hobbs said her daughter’s lack of local connections, her poverty, drug use and sex work may have been responsible for the lack of law enforcement attention in the immediate aftermath of her death.
“She was my daughter. She was my princess. She was the best person I have ever known,” Hobbs said.
Christina Hobbs, who was 26, was killed the day after Christmas in 2022. She was found with a gunshot wound in a squatter’s apartment at Florida Vista on Florida Boulevard between Sharp Road and McGehee Drive. No gun was found at the scene.
Investigators initially considered her death a suicide.
Misha Hobbs talked to her daughter for the last time that Christmas Eve. She didn’t sound like herself, Hobbs said.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I knew Christmas Day something was wrong,” she said.
Hobbs had trouble believing that her daughter was dead, and even more trouble believing that she had taken her own life. She kept calling her daughter’s phone.
On New Year’s Eve, someone answered the phone. Hobbs said it was Lang.
“I was lonely and I was calling her phone number to get her to call me and her phone answered, and it was him,” she said. “I don’t know how I had the wherewithal, but I recorded it. I spoke with him for almost an hour. And he was pretty much bragging about it. He told me that Christina was coming home (to Oklahoma). And that’s what got her killed.”
Hobbs said she gave the recording to police.
Johnson, Lang’s other victim, knew Christina Hobbs and called 911 when she was shot, Misha Hobbs said. The mom believes had officers been faster in investigating her daughter’s death, that may have saved Johnson, who was beaten to death seven months later.
As she goes over and over her daughter’s last days in her mind, Misha Hobbs has come to believe that her daughter may have been a victim of human trafficking.
That’s based on “code” words she saw on her daughter’s social media and realizing that she was rarely able to talk to her privately, she said.
“Her phones were always broken so that she had to have the speaker on,” Misha Hobbs said.
She said she and her two surviving daughters tried to make Christina Hobbs’ grave a peaceful place by installing a Victorian wrought-iron bench and a similarly-styled light.
The bench had been at Misha Hobbs’ home and they had talked about how nice it would be to sit outside on their bench and catch up the next time her daughter was home. Christina Hobbs never got to sit on it.
Misha Hobbs wanted it to be close to her. The next time she went to her daughter’s grave, the bench was gone.
“Even in her death she was not respected,” Hobbs said.
She wants to honor her daughter by finding ways to make sure that people get a better response from the system than she did.
From the case not being aggressively investigated as a homicide just after her death, to the jury returning the verdict that Lang was guilty only of negligent homicide rather than murder in her daughter’s death, to her graveside bench being stolen, Hobbs said she wants Christina’s legacy to be showing that the system can behave differently.
“She still deserved just as much protection and respect as any other person does,” Hobbs said.
And Hobbs wants to make sure the next person gets that.
“They deserve to be safe,” she said.
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