Meier Case to Jury : Rizk Yelled Once Too Often, Lawyer for Her Son Says

Describing Shirley Rizk as a mother who “screamed one too many times” at her son, the defense attorney for Torran Lee Meier asked a jury Monday to find the teen-ager guilty only of manslaughter in her strangulation, and not of murder.

In closing arguments after a seven-week trial in Van Nuys Superior Court, Deputy Public Defender James H. Barnes portrayed Meier, 17, of Canoga Park, as an “emotionally overwrought” youth with a damaged brain who “just broke down” after years of psychological abuse by Rizk.

The prosecutor, however, dismissed the defense arguments as “hocus-pocus” and urged the jury to find Meier guilty of first-degree murder. The jury will begin deliberations today.

Meier and two of his friends are accused of killing Rizk, 34, and attempting to kill Meier’s 8-year-old half-brother, Rory Rizk, after he wandered in on the slaying last October.

The two alleged accomplices, Richard A. Parker, 24, of Antelope Valley, and Matthew A. Jay, 18, of Woodland Hills, will be tried later. Along with Meier, they have been charged with murder, attempted murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder.

Testimony showed that Meier tried to poison Rory Rizk and, when that effort failed, tied him up and placed him in a burning car that was pushed over a cliff in Malibu, with his mother’s body in the front seat. Rory Rizk said he freed his hands and climbed out of the car.

In urging an acquittal on the charge of attempted murder, Barnes argued that Meier never intended to harm Rory Rizk but was forced to stage a murder attempt to dupe his two friends, who were “desperate to avoid detection.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward G. Feldman countered that only some “very fortuitous circumstances” kept Rory Rizk from being burned alive in the car or plunging to his death off the cliff. Dense brush along the hillside prevented the car from falling 300 to 400 feet, Feldman said.

Barnes argued that Meier was a victim of his mother’s flawed child-rearing practices. Friends and relatives testified during the trial that Rizk yelled at Meier at all hours of the night, berated him as a “faggot” in front of friends and tormented him by walking around the house topless.

Brain Defect Alleged

Years of such emotional abuse, combined with what a psychiatrist described as a physical defect in Meier’s brain, destroyed the young man’s reasoning abilities and made him unable to plan such a killing, Barnes said.

“Perhaps, undoubtedly, she screamed one too many times,” Barnes said.

In order to prove first-degree murder, the prosecution must show that a defendant intended to kill the victim and carried out the act with premeditation. Voluntary manslaughter, on the other hand, is a killing provoked by the “heat of passion.”

Feldman, the prosecutor, said Meier demonstrated a degree of planning by commissioning two friends to aid in the killing.

He noted that other medical experts testified that Meier’s brain was normal and that, even if the abnormality described by a defense witness did exist, doctors cannot say how the flaw would affect an individual’s judgment.

Conceding that Shirley Rizk was “not a very pleasant person,” the prosecutor said: “Life is filled with stresses; some of them are unfair. But one does not kill.”