Testimony Ends in Lam Trial as Jurors Tour Death Scene

Testimony in the murder trial of Minh Van Lam ended Thursday with the prosecution and defense debating one last time the trail of blood marks left in the Cal State Fullerton office of slain physics professor Edward Lee Cooperman.

Jurors also got a first-hand look Thursday at the controversial blood marks when they visited Cooperman’s office, on the sixth floor of the Science Building.

Both sides concluded their cases after just eight days of testimony. Lam, 21, a former student of Cooperman, did not take the stand.

Lam did not testify, said defense attorney Alan May, because the jurors already knew his story from his statements to the police. The prosecution’s case against Lam is based on the physical evidence, and “there’s nothing my client could have added that would have helped the jury,” May said.

The last defense witness Thursday was Richard I. Fukimoto, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on the 48-year-old Cooperman. Fukimoto was also the key prosecution witness.

The case is expected to go to the jury Monday after closing arguments and jury instructions.

Cooperman, whose scientific and humanitarian efforts in Vietnam gained him international attention, was fatally shot through the left side of the neck with a .25-caliber handgun. Lam told police in reporting the incident that the shooting was an accident. He said the gun went off when the professor grabbed his arm to show him how to aim it.

Defense attorney May called Fukimoto to try to bolster his position that the blood marks left in Cooperman’s office are consistent with Lam’s story that he shot the professor by accident.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mel Jensen had called Fukimoto earlier to try to show that the absence of blood marks where Lam said the shooting occurred proves that Lam lied to the police.

Jensen claims that blood spurting from that neck wound should have left blood on Lam’s shirt and the lap of his pants, or at least on the floor in front of the chair where Lam claims Cooperman was sitting when the shooting occurred.

May claims the blood isn’t there because Cooperman was leaning toward his left, away from Lam, when the gun went off.

Thursday morning, jurors got a chance to see the blood marks themselves when Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom led them to the scene of the Oct. 13, 1984, shooting, Room 665B of the Science Building at Cal State Fullerton.

Blood is found on the north wall, above a chair that has a bloody back rest, on the south wall and just above the professor’s desk. A large sheet of blood covers most of the northeast corner of the office, where Cooperman’s body was found. Lesser amounts are found beneath and on top of the desk and on a file cabinet behind the desk.

Both May and Jensen agree that Cooperman at some point must have fallen across the desk. A file tray on the desk is turned on its side. Numerous papers are mussed and bloodied. On the floor under the desk is a green aspirin bottle. In front on the floor is a black and white picture of Cooperman’s two teen-age daughters, apparently knocked from the desk.

The rest of the office looks like a typical college professor’s office. A row of bookshelves along the east wall reaches almost to the ceiling. Along the south wall, next to the door, is the desk that several Vietnamese students have said Cooperman often let them use for their studies. Cooperman’s black sport coat is still hung on a chair at a table on the north wall.

A wall calendar still depicts September/October, 1984. There’s also a color wall map of Southeast Asia.

On the glass door to the office, Cooperman’s name is written in his own handwriting on a small card. Another small card shows his office hours for fall semester, 1984.

Lam was expressionless as jurors were escorted past him, two at a time, into the room. They were told they could kneel down and look on the floor but were not to touch anything.

After the jurors left, Judge Beacom allowed members of the news media to view the room from outside the door.

May complimented the Fullerton Police Department, saying it had done an excellent job of reconstructing the room as it was the afternoon of the shooting. The room had been disrupted by the teams of police investigators and technicians as they gathered evidence in the two weeks following the shooting.

Lam claims that he and Cooperman were sitting in chairs facing each other, only inches apart, when the gun went off. Lam said he helped Cooperman to the floor in the northeast corner, then left the room to see if there was anyone in the hall to help. He said he came back, saw Cooperman lying in the same place but face down instead of on his back, then left again. He did not return until nearly four hours later, after he had taken a girlfriend to a movie.

Lam’s statements to police include no explanation for how Cooperman’s blood got all over the office. May claims Cooperman must have gotten up from the corner when Lam went out to seek help in the hallway, struggled to get to the telephone, then fell back into his own blood.

But Jensen managed to get two witnesses--Fukimoto and May’s own criminalist, Richard H. Fox--to say that if Cooperman was facing Lam when the gun went off, blood should have shown up either on the floor between their two chairs, or on Lam’s pants lap or his shirt or jacket.

Jurors will undoubtedly discuss in their deliberations the videotape in which Lam reenacts the shooting for police, to see if he indicates Cooperman leaning directly forward, as Jensen claims the film shows.

May called Fukimoto to try to show the jury that there may not have been blood between the two chairs because internal bleeding may have kept Cooperman’s blood from spurting out in a stream, as Fukimoto had described for the prosecution last week.

Fukimoto said Thursday that he could not rule out that internal bleeding prevented a heavy blood spurt from Cooperman’s wound. But on cross-examination by Jensen, Fukimoto stuck by his earlier assessment that the spurting blood from the wound was the more likely event.

But Fukimoto did give some credence to another May theory --that the blood smears left by Cooperman’s shirt on the filing cabinet behind the desk most likely came after Cooperman was lying in the northeast corner first.

It was in that corner, Fukimoto testified, where most of the external bleeding occurred, soaking the shirt.

But Fukimoto on cross-examination said the back of Cooperman’s shirt could also have become soaked if the professor deflected spurting blood from the wound with his hand.

Jensen offered no rebuttal witnesses after the defense rested.