Lam Gets 3-Year Sentence for Slaying of Cooperman

Vietnamese student Minh Van Lam, convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Cal State Fullerton physics professor Edward Lee Cooperman, was sentenced to three years in prison Friday by a Superior Court judge who said he did not believe the student’s version of what happened.

The 21-year-old Lam, who said Cooperman was like a father to him, was convicted two months ago in his second trial in the physics professor’s Oct. 13, 1984, shooting death. His first trial, on a charge of first-degree murder, ended with the jury deadlocked on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Prosecutors offered no motive for Cooperman’s shooting death. They rejected suggestions by Cooperman’s friends that it was a political assassination, claiming a lack of any evidence to prove it.

Judge Richard J. Beacom conceded Friday that the truth about the physics professor’s death may not have come out in the case. But the judge lambasted friends of Cooperman who claim that the judge and the prosecutors helped cover up a political assassination.

“God help us if we ever get to the point where we (convict) people on the basis of speculation and rumor,” Beacom said.

Lam told police he shot Cooperman with a .22-caliber handgun at Cooperman’s campus office when the professor grabbed his arm to show him how to aim the gun. According to trial testimony, Lam left Cooperman for dead without calling paramedics, went to a movie with a girlfriend, then returned four hours later to place the gun in the professor’s outstretched hand.

Lam Asks Probation

At the first trial in February, jurors voted unanimously against first-degree murder and eventually deadlocked between an involuntary manslaughter verdict and a not-guilty decision. A second jury was picked in March, but both sides agreed before testimony began to let Beacom decide the case, based mostly on the evidence at the first trial.

Lam, speaking through an interpreter, asked Beacom on Friday to grant him probation because “I want to prove to the community I am not an assassin or a bad person.”

But Beacom countered that Lam had not shown remorse for the killing and had not told the truth about what happened.

“Maybe Mr. Lam is remorseful now about what he did . . . but the time to be remorseful was lickety-split after that gun went off. He should have called for help,” Beacom said.

Beacom also was skeptical that Cooperman, who had told friends about death threats and was concerned for his life, would have let a student put a loaded gun up to his neck, as Lam claimed.

The 48-year-old professor, who ran a foundation that provided scientific and humanitarian aid to communist-controlled Vietnam, had befriended numerous Vietnamese students. Many of the students were unaware that he was an advocate of normalization of U.S. relations with the government the students had fled in the 1970s.

Second-Year Student

Lam, who came to the United States seven years ago, lived with his adoptive mother and her two daughters. He was a second-year student at Cal State Fullerton at the time of Cooperman’s death.

Beacom could have sentenced Lam to as much as six years in prison--four years for the crime, plus two for use of a firearm. The three-year sentence was the medium term, and the judge dropped the two years for the firearm use.

Cooperman’s widow, Klaaske, who was in court with one of her two teen-age daughters, said later that she was pleased with the sentence imposed, “considering I expected Lam to get probation and walk out free today.”

Klaaske Cooperman has maintained that her husband was assassinated by right-wing elements and insists that Lam was only a minor figure in a larger conspiracy.

But she has been less vocal than some of Cooperman’s friends. At Friday’s sentencing hearing, Beacom gave them a chance to say whatever they wanted about the case for the record.

The most outspoken was Tony Russo, a defendant in the 1974 Pentagon Papers case, who said the Lam trials “cast a dark cloud over the whole system.”

Russo said witnesses who could have supported the political assassination theory were not permitted by the prosecution to testify, and that Beacom should have done a better job at controlling defense attorney Alan May’s “smear” tactics against Cooperman’s name.

Another Cooperman supporter, Theresa Sanchez, told Beacom that if he gave Lam probation “you will be issuing a license to kill activists in the U.S. working for peace.”

Five spoke in all, including Klaaske Cooperman. Two spoke on behalf of Lam, including June Foley, one of the jurors at the first trial.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright, who prosecuted the second trial, was just as hard on the Cooperman friends as Judge Beacom.

‘Damned Little Evidence’

Their response, he said, reminded him of South American countries where “the Left always prosecutes the Right when in power because they know the Right must be guilty. Then the Right prosecutes the Left when in power for the same reason.”

“What we had in this case,” Enright said in court, “was a lot of rumors and theories and damned little evidence.”

After all the evidence, no one really knows what happened inside Cooperman’s office, Enright said, defending the judge’s involuntary manslaughter ruling.

But Enright told the court that Lam should be denied probation because his actions after the shooting showed his callousness.

“After the shooting, Lam doesn’t do one thing to help his best friend,” Enright argued. “Even animals help each other when one of them is hurt. Primate apes help their loved ones. But what did Lam do? He went to the movies, played a video game, then came back to plant the gun and make it look like a suicide.”

Lam attorney May argued that his client’s reaction was that of a “scared, immature, panicked kid.”

May sought probation for Lam, who has been in custody since the shooting, based on a favorable probation report. But Beacom agreed with Enright that probation was not appropriate because of Lam’s actions after the shooting.

Judge Troubled by Check

Beacom echoed a point made by Enright about a $90 check from Cooperman’s checkbook found on Lam the day he was arrested. Handwriting experts showed that Cooperman wrote out the amount, but that the signature was a forgery. Why would Lam go ahead and write out the check if he were upset about Cooperman’s death, Enright asked.

“The question of the check is enormously troublesome,” Beacom said.

He added that he was troubled by other explanations by Lam, but added “who will ever know . . . maybe we didn’t get the truth, maybe we never will.”

Beacom added that while he did not believe Lam’s version, that did not make Lam guilty of murder. The only thing proved, Beacom said, was that Lam was guilty of “criminal negligence.”