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A Livermore man serving life in prison for a 2012 murder in a dispute over money and a romantic rivalry was found fatally wounded in his cell, corrections officials said Friday.
Jacob Kober, 35, was pronounced dead at 7:52 p.m. Thursday (Sept. 19) at Kern Valley State Prison with injuries consistent with an improvised weapon made in prison, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement. His cellmate, Matthew Perez, was injured.
Prison officials are investigating Kober’s death as a homicide.
Kober was imprisoned for murdering a former friend on a Livermore golf course in 2012, according to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors said Kober and 28-year-old Kenneth Robert Ogden were old friends who had a falling out because Ogden owed Kober money and Kober thought Ogden tried to kiss his girlfriend.
The two went to the then-Springtown Golf Course the night of the murder to talk things over, but once they walked out onto the grass, Kober shot Ogden in the left arm and the right side, prosecutors said.
A woman jogging the next morning spotted Ogden’s body lying in the grass along a fairway on the course.
Kober fled to Oakland and then Oregon to avoid arrest and allegedly sent threatening text messages to witnesses in the case. He was arrested in Oregon on Jan. 16, 2013, and was extradited to California to face the murder charge. Kober was convicted in 2015.
Ogden’s mother, Rachael Supnet, reacted on social media to the news of Kober’s death, saying on Facebook that “justice has been served … son you now can RIP.”
She later posted a TikTok video, saying in part, “I am at a sigh of relief … I’m saddened. This won’t bring my son back, but it’s a great ending. And I’m so sorry for everybody. Prayers for everyone.”
Kober’s cellmate, Perez, 39, was convicted in Monterey County of assault with a firearm, with enhancements for a street gang act in commission of a violent felony.
In 2014, while in prison, Perez was sentenced to eight years for assault by a prisoner with a deadly weapon or force likely to cause great bodily injury. In 2016, he was sentenced to two years for possession of a controlled substance while in prison.
Kober was also implicated in a serious crime while in prison — the death of fellow inmate Devlin Stringfellow, 48, at the state prison in Folsom in January 2018. Kober and another inmate were identified at the time as the prime suspects in the slaying of Stringfellow, a white supremacist gang leader, but the outcome of that homicide investigation was not immediately clear.
— Story by Bay City News Service. Livermore Vine editorial director Jeremy Walsh contributed to this report.
