Loner Gets 26 Years in Murder of Friend

‘I was mad at myself and my life was going nowhere.’--Michael Anthony Cabrera

Mark Irwin Krawll appeared to have a promising future. At 30, he had just completed a master’s degree in business administration. He had met a woman he liked and he was about to land a prized management job.

Krawll’s friend, Michael Anthony Cabrera, now 33, was a college dropout who had trouble holding down a job. His marriage had fallen apart and he was estranged from the rest of his family.

For more than a year, Krawll had allowed Cabrera to share his apartment in the Fairfax District and had lent him money to help tide him over.

“Mark was always there to help the underdog,” his mother, Joyce Krawll, reflected Friday. “That’s the kind of upbringing you give your children.”

Exactly one year ago Friday, Cabrera got out of bed in the middle of the night and looked at his reflection in the mirror for a few minutes. Then, he grabbed five knives and a carving fork from the kitchen and stabbed Krawll 38 times.

Krawll hung on for 11 days before succumbing to his wounds.

No Ill Will

Cabrera told police that he and Krawll had never argued and that he harbored no ill feelings toward his friend, whom he described as “a good person.”

“What made Mark the object of your attack?” a detective asked him while Krawll fought for his life at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Because he was there, I guess,” the defendant answered, according to a police transcript.

More recently, Cabrera told a probation officer, “I was mad at myself and my life was going nowhere.”

On Friday, Superior Court Commissioner Sam Bubrick sentenced Cabrera to 26 years to life in prison for what his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Randall A. Megee described as an “inexcusable tragedy.” Cabrera was convicted of first-degree murder last month after a one-day non-jury trial.

Outside the courtroom, Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn expressed skepticism about Cabrera’s explanation of the crime, pointing out that the defendant never mentioned that he had forged his friend’s signature on two checks. The checks, for a total of roughly $200, had not yet been returned by the bank at the time of the attack, according to Conn.

“When they did come back, he knew he would be confronted by the victim, who would know that he was stealing behind his back,” the prosecutor said.

Conn said the killer and his victim met at Custom Craft-Nortek Co., an aerospace parts manufacturer in Culver City, where Krawll worked as a production coordinator and Cabrera was a shipping and receiving clerk.

Lost His Job

Cabrera told his probation officer, John T. Clare, that he eventually quit his job because he was “not going anywhere.” But Conn said Cabrera was fired because he had “a short fuse.”

The two friends seemed to lead contrasting lives.

Krawll, his mother told the court before sentencing, was active in the Masonic Lodge and in a variety of Jewish organizations. His father is the cantor at Temple Emanuel on the Westside. She said 1,300 people attended her son’s funeral, “people whose lives were touched in some special way by Mark.”

“He was really a charitable guy,” Conn said. “One thing I picked up from looking at his financial records was that he made a lot of charitable contributions even though he didn’t have a large salary.”

Boxes of Letters

After the funeral, Joyce Krawll said in an interview, she got “boxes--literally boxes--of letters” from people who had benefited from her son’s generosity or kindness. One woman wrote to say that Mark had risked his own life to save her son from drowning. Others told of how he had visited them daily in the hospital while they were laid up.

“These were things Mark never talked about,” his mother said.

A close friend of the family, who did not want her name used, remembers Krawll as “someone who transcended all age groups.”

“When my parents were sick,” she said, “Mark would call them all the time. He was that kind of person.”

Their son was unusually close to his family, his parents said. “He always admired the fact that our generation placed such importance on a close family life,” said his father, Edward Kraw1819029024continue in their lifetime,” the cantor added.

A Lonely Life

For Cabrera, however, life was grim and lonely, by all accounts. Conn said he had recently broken up with a girlfriend in Arizona. His marriage had ended in 1982.

“I hadn’t worked for three months. . . . I had a lot of frustration . . . plus I owed him (Krawll) money for rent,” Cabrera told Detective Robert Howe the day after his arrest. Investigators found $14 in his bank account.

The night of April 3, he and Krawll had gone out drinking. Lying awake in bed that night, Cabrera said in his confession, “I was thinking . . . what am I going to do? . . . Future jobs were really slim.”

“He kept internalizing his problems until he exploded,” defense attorney Megee said. “His life fell apart, and he went crazy for about 10 minutes.”