Student Gets 3 Years in Professor’s Death : Judge Lambastes Rumors That Vietnamese Was Part of Conspiracy

A 21-year-old Vietnamese student convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of physics professor Edward Lee Cooperman of California State University, Fullerton, was sentenced to three years in prison Friday.

In imposing the penalty, Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom said he did not believe the student’s version of what happened.

Minh Van Lam, who said Cooperman was like a father to him, was convicted two months ago of the professor’s Oct. 13, 1984, shooting death, after his first trial ended in a hung jury.

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

Judge Lambastes Friends

Beacom said Friday that he agreed that the truth about the professor’s death may not have come out in the case. But the judge lambasted Cooperman’s friends, 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 that he shot Cooperman with a .22-caliber pistol in the professor’s campus office after Cooperman grabbed his arm to show Lam how to aim the weapon at him.

Lam left Cooperman for dead without calling paramedics, went to a movie with a girlfriend and then returned to the office four hours later to place the gun in the professor’s outstretched hand.

Jurors in February were deadlocked between a finding of involuntary manslaughter and not guilty. 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.

Plea for Probation

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,” the judge said.

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

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 relations with the government they 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 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.

Lam’s attorney, Alan 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 Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright, prosecutor at the second trial, that probation was not appropriate because of Lam’s actions after the shooting.