Jurors Get Case of Girl’s Plunge

Only one person alive knows what happened on the treacherous steps of Inspiration Point in Rancho Palos Verdes on the afternoon of Nov. 8, 2000.

That’s when 4-year-old Lauren Key of Huntington Beach was hiking with her father, Cameron Brown, and plunged off a 120-foot cliff to her death on the rocks below.

Did her father, now being tried on charges of first-degree murder in Los Angeles County Superior Court in Torrance, guide the child up to the seaside bluff and throw her off the side? Or did she slip and fall?

Brown’s fate now rests with a jury, which began deliberations Friday. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

The case against Brown, 44, is almost entirely circumstantial. During the two-month trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig Hum painted a picture of a man who never wanted a child and tormented the woman who made him a father against his will.

In an impassioned closing argument Thursday, Hum urged the jury also to consider the strained relationship between Lauren’s father and mother, not just the last minutes of her life. Understanding that relationship is essential to understanding how Brown came to commit such a heinous crime, Hum said.

Brown met Lauren’s mother, then Sarah Key, in Newport Beach in 1995. The two had dated only a few weeks when Key, a British immigrant in the United States on a work visa, told Brown she was pregnant. Brown urged her to have an abortion, which she refused to do, Hum said.

Furious, Brown contacted the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to have Key deported, the prosecutor told the jury. When that failed, Brown contacted her employer and tried to have her fired, also without success.

Several months after Lauren’s birth, a judge ordered Brown to pay child support.

“He has to pay $1,000 for a child he never wanted to a woman he despises -- and $1,000 a month is a lot of money to a baggage handler living on his boat in Marina del Rey,” Hum said.

But defense attorney Mark Geragos argued that a man can resent the mother of his daughter and still love the child.

It is true, he said, that Brown felt trapped by a woman whom he met in a bar and who he believed used him to stay in the United States. Because Brown used a condom when they first had sex, it is also understandable that he did not believe Key was carrying his child until a paternity test proved it, Geragos said.

But after he accepted Lauren as his own, Brown restructured his life to fit her into it and became a loving father, Geragos said. “When the paternity test came back that it was his child ... he did everything possible to get visitation,” he said. “He saw this child as much as he humanly could. He started to fall madly in love and feel passionately about his child.”

There is a difference, Geragos said, as he walked up to the courtroom railing and looked jurors in the eye, between being angry with a mother and murdering your own child, especially for a man with no criminal history.

Then there was the subject of Lauren’s adoption.

At one point Key -- now Key-Marer -- proposed that Brown sever his parental rights and allow her husband to adopt the child, Geragos said. The prosecution had said Brown eagerly agreed to the idea, but Geragos said his client adamantly refused.

“If he didn’t care about Lauren, wouldn’t this be a godsend?” Geragos asked.

The case against Brown, Geragos said, has been purely emotional as the prosecutor has sought to demonize him, making Brown “subhuman.”

Geragos then walked over to the defense table and put his hand on Brown’s shoulder. “This is Cameron Brown,” he said. “He’s a human being.”

But during the trial -- presided over by Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold -- the prosecutor argued that no one wants to believe a man would kill his own child, and yet such cases do happen.

Take, for example, a man who kills his pregnant wife to be with his mistress, Hum said, in a clear reference to convicted murderer Scott Peterson, another Geragos client.

Hum pointed out that Lauren was 3 before Brown saw her for the first time. He said Brown had only 14 visits with her -- all in an effort to have his child support payments reduced.

The visits presented another problem for Brown, Hum said. His wife, Patty, who had no children of her own, wanted Lauren for herself, he said. Sheriff’s detectives found that on the day Lauren died, the prosecutor said, Patty had been searching websites for information on how the couple could legally take Lauren away from her mother.

During the trial, as Hum described the last moments of Lauren’s short life, jurors and courtroom observers sat riveted.

Hum spoke of Lauren crawling on all fours on the hiking path, probably exhausted and frightened, trying to keep up with her father. Even if the young girl had survived the fall, he said, Brown ensured that she would die by waiting 15 minutes before pulling her out of the water.

Instead, the prosecutor said, Brown walked to a different area, where he borrowed a cellphone from a hiker, before stopping to take off his clothes to retrieve his daughter.

Hum told jurors of how Brown chuckled as he told nude bathers that they’d better dress because emergency help was on the way.

Several onlookers started to cry and jurors struggled to contain their emotions; one juror wiped her eyes and another covered her face with her hands. Lauren’s mother wept silently.

Through it all, the prosecutor continued to drive home his theme that Brown was merciless -- never even bothering to call Key-Marer to tell her about Lauren’s death.

“Until the defendant is arrested three years later, the defendant never said a word to her no matter how hard she begged. Pleaded. Cried,” Hum said. Then he quoted one of Key-Marer’s sobbing telephone messages to Brown in which she cried: “I just need to know what happened to my baby; please tell me.”

“It helps us understand the lengths the defendant was willing to go to, to punish Sarah,” Hum said. “It shows how vindictive he is. It brings us to one horrifying ... conclusion: This man threw his 4-year-old daughter off Inspiration Point to her death. He did it. He did it.”

But Geragos argued that the prosecution’s case unravels because of an eyewitness account.

The last person to see Lauren alive with Brown -- before they reached the top of Inspiration Point -- was a man named Terry Hope. Hope testified that he saw the little girl smiling and playing, running to the edge of the path, throwing rocks or bits of grass.

“This is the neutron bomb to their case,” Geragos said. “Terry Hope said she was playing -- playing, happy, smiling; they can’t get around Terry Hope. Now if that isn’t reasonable doubt, I don’t know what is.”

Detectives interviewed Hope, but the prosecution did not call him to testify, Geragos said.

Which leaves open what actually happened on the cliff.

Both sides brought in their own experts.

Los Angeles County Deputy Medical Examiner Ogbonna Chinwah ruled Lauren’s death a homicide, finding her injuries to be inconsistent with an accidental fall because she would have had abrasions on her hands, arms, back and other areas as she struggled to grasp something, which was not the case.

Dr. Wilson T. Hayes, an expert in injury biomechanics who has taught at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concurred with Chinwah.

The defense called in Gary T. Yamaguchi, a biomechanical expert, who testified that Lauren had scratch marks on her left side running in three directions. This indicated she probably rolled and bounced and landed three times before going over the cliff, consistent with a fall.

Also, Lauren broke a wrist during the fall, but the skin above the break had only a bruise -- no lacerations or abrasions, Yamaguchi noted. If she had been thrown, the skin would have broken on impact, he said.

In his rebuttal, Hum pointed out that Brown never told detectives he saw his daughter tumble or roll, so Yamaguchi’s simulated analysis was inconsistent with the defendant’s own version of what happened.

Even if everything the defense said is true, Hum said, Brown is guilty at least of second-degree murder for bringing his daughter to a clearly dangerous place and then neglecting to safeguard her.

“We were up there; we saw how scary it was,” he told jurors, who visited the site Wednesday. “We all know the truth now.”