Postscript : Questions Linger in Professor’s Death

The man in the color photograph smiles faintly from the back cover of the magazine, clutching a bouquet of flowers, surrounded by Vietnamese children. Above him, in stark white letters set in a broad black border, are the words: “Was Ed Cooperman Assassinated?”

Edward Lee Cooperman, 48, a physics professor at Cal State Fullerton, was shot to death in his office on Oct. 14, 1984, under circumstances never fully explained, despite two criminal trials.

Minh Van Lam, 21, a Vietnamese student, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison for the killing, which he said grew out of a playful scuffle between two friends. Cooperman had been involved in helping Vietnamese students on the Fullerton campus, and equally active in promoting better relations between the United States and the communist government of Vietnam.

The ad appeared on the back of the August issue of Mother Jones magazine, a San Francisco-based publication with a national circulation of 170,000. According to Tony Russo, a founder of the Committee for Justice for Professor Ed Cooperman, the ad cost $2,085 and was designed to raise money for the wrongful-death civil suit filed against Lam and unnamed “others” by Cooperman’s widow, Klaaske.

“It’s only just sinking in,” she said of her husband’s death. “It’s already almost a year. It doesn’t seem possible.” Her daughters “are picking up their lives, more or less,” she said. Lam is in the California Institution for Men at Chino, where, according to his lawyer, Alan May, “his spirits seem to be OK. He has no problems that I know of.” He will be eligible for parole next March.

May said his Santa Ana law firm has just about recovered from the effects of defending Lam, which cost May and his partner, George H. Chula, between $25,000 and $30,000. This loss, together with several other circumstances, last July caused the partnership to seek protection from creditors under federal bankruptcy laws.

May said the firm expects to seek dismissal of the Chapter 11 provision within 90 days.

The Mother Jones ad, which names May and charges that he was “procured” as an attorney for Lam by Tran Minh Cong, former chief of the Saigon Police Academy, “doesn’t surprise me,” May said, denying that he received any money from Cong, the CIA or anyone else.

“I have no regrets at all” for defending Lam, said May, a combat veteran who spent more than a year in Vietnam. “I saved that boy’s life.”

The Cooperman committee, Russo said, met weekly until the summer and plans to start up again this month. “We want to keep the story alive,” he said.

Lawrence G. Teeter, who represents Klaaske Cooperman and her daughters, said that “a civil suit opens up the possibility of gaining access to information” surrounding the killing, some of which was not offered by the prosecution during the criminal proceedings, including the possibility that Cooperman was assassinated by anti-communist Vietnamese.

While the suit seeks monetary compensation for the Cooperman family, Teeter said, “the order of priority is to obtain justice.”