SAN DIEGO – A woman diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia was convicted Tuesday of first-degree murder for stabbing her board-and-care roommate more than 200 times using a kitchen fork and four knives.

Lanika Phillips, 27, faces a term of 56 years to life in prison when she is sentenced Nov. 6. She was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read.

Jurors took about two hours before reaching their decision.

In his closing argument last week, Deputy District Attorney James Koerber said Phillips killed 43-year-old Penny Powell in November 2005 in a premeditated and deliberate attack.

The victim had 86 stab wounds to the head and neck, and she was also stabbed in the heart and lungs, Koerber said.

Powell's body was discovered on Nov. 30, 2005, in the Broadway apartment she shared with Phillips and another woman.

Phillips was the last person seen with Powell two days before her body was discovered, Koerber said.

At the time of the attack, Phillips was on probation for stabbing a former roommate at a National City independent-living facility in February 2005, the prosecutor said.

After that attack on Swantay Nash, the defendant told her aunt, “I wish I'd killed her,” the prosecutor said.

Koerber told the jury that Phillips was violent, confrontational, demanding and intimidating to roommates.

The reason for the fatal attack might never be known, but it could have been over food, a phone, cigarettes or a purse, the prosecutor said.

The defendant's bloody pants were found stuffed in a bedroom closet in the apartment, Koerber said.

Defense attorney Charles Guthrie told the jury it was reasonable to assume that the bloody pants didn't belong to Phillips, because DNA can be transferred very easily.

Guthrie said the circumstantial evidence in the case was “not really strong.”

He suggested to the jury that someone else might have killed Powell.

“(Whoever) killed Penny Powell was evil. Pure evil. An explosion of evil,” Guthrie said.

He said Phillips had been diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia and can become combative and abrupt when she doesn't take her medication.

Guthrie said whoever killed the victim was involved in “an explosive, frenzied, evil killing you could possibly ever imagine,”

The attorney said the attack on Powell “exceeded the bounds of a normal person.”

Guthrie said the killing wasn't premeditated but involved “some kind of craziness.”

He said the attack went beyond torture.

“It's literal craziness involved here,” Guthrie said, suggesting the attacker might have been provoked.

“This was evil passion,” the attorney told the jury.

Guthrie reminded jurors that there was something intellectually wrong with Phillips and urged them to return a humane verdict.