DAVENPORT -- A Davenport man has been convicted of second degree murder for stabbing a local Iraq war veteran to death last summer.
At only 29 years old, Romane Nunn had served two tours of duty in Iraq and had returned to his hometown.
He was playing the video game Pokemon Go in the park last August, when William Crawford approached him, mistaking Nunn for someone who had assaulted his girlfriend.
Nunn was stabbed once in the heart, and died.
Crawford was convicted by a Scott County jury on Friday. Earlier in the week, he testified that he didn't mean to kill Nunn, but had just meant to hurt him.
Nunn's grandmother came to court every day. She had raised him since he was 10 years old.
"Romane was a very tender-hearted person. He would give you the shirt off his back. It's our corrupt society, people just have no value of another person's life, " said Jenny Nunn.
"There is no way you can sit down and make sense of what's happened here," she said.
Nunn wanted to enlist in the Army as a teenager, but was told he needed to achieve his G-E-D first.
"When they told him he could enlist in the military if he would go down and get his G-E-D, now this child went down to Scott Community College at night, spent a few nights there, and got his G-E-D because he wanted to go into the service. He served two tours in Iraq, and one in Germany. He volunteered to go the second time," said his grandmother.
She had hoped the jury would convict Crawford of first degree murder, not for vengeance, but to protect others.
"My desire for him getting life is that he wouldn't walk these streets and do that to anyone else," she said.
Crawford will be sentenced on October 5th and faces up to 50 years in prison.