Professor’s Killer Freed From Prison

The Vietnamese student convicted of killing Cal State Fullerton Prof. Edward Lee Cooperman has quietly returned to Orange County after his release 10 days ago from the state prison at Chino.

Minh Van Lam, now 22, was convicted last year of involuntary manslaughter in the physics professor’s Oct. 13, 1984, slaying at his campus office.

Lam, a Cal State Fullerton sophomore and a former student of Cooperman, continues to deny that he was part of a political conspiracy and maintains that he shot the professor by accident while the two were practicing with a .25-caliber handgun.

His release from prison came just 20 months after the 48-year-old professor’s death.

The shooting sparked an outcry among Cooperman’s family and friends, who are active in Vietnamese affairs. They believe the professor’s death was engineered by right-wing Vietnamese elements because of his ties to the Communist Vietnamese government and his strong views in favor of normalization of relations with Vietnam.

Cooperman was head of an organization that provided medical supplies to Vietnam, and had told his wife and close friends in the few weeks before his death that threats had been made on his life.

Lam told police that he and Cooperman were in the professor’s office practicing with the gun, which Cooperman owned, because the professor insisted on it. The gun went off, he said, when Cooperman tried to show him how to take a gun away from someone. “I did not lie,” Lam said Monday about his account of Cooperman’s death.

Lam said he is trying to put the Cooperman shooting behind him.

“I just want to go back to school and get on with my life,” he said.

Lam was sentenced to three years in prison by Superior Court Judge Richard K. Beacom, who decided the case without a jury, at Lam’s request, after Lam’s first trial ended in a hung jury.

His release from prison came just a little more than a year after his March 28, 1985, conviction, because he was given credit for time served in the Orange County Jail, about nine months, plus time off for good behavior.

Lam, who has gained 30 pounds and now wears wire-rimmed glasses, said thinking about Cooperman and the case made it difficult for him to pursue his studies in electronics and computers while he was in prison, first at Tehachapi and then at Chino.

Most of the time, he said, “I tried to block all of it out of my mind.”

The anger of Cooperman’s friends was directed mostly at the district attorney’s office and the Fullerton police. They believed that the police and prosecutors failed to actively pursue the political assassination theory.

Klaaske Cooperman, the professor’s wife, said Monday that she was informed about Lam’s release but that it did not stir any anger in her.

“I still believe that Lam was being used by someone else, and that there was another person in the room when my husband was shot,” she said. “If I were Lam I would tell what really happened, before someone decides to shut him up.”

Civil Suit Pending

Klaaske Cooperman and her two young daughters still have a civil suit pending against Lam over the professor’s death. The woman said she is aware that Lam has no funds.

“Getting a money judgment against him is not the purpose of the lawsuit,” she said. “What we hope to do is discover more information about what happened.”

Lam was interviewed Monday outside the courtroom in Westminster where the trial began for two young Vietnamese accused of attempted murder in the March 19 shooting of Tran Khanh Van. The victim, a former South Vietnam housing official who now has a real estate business in Westminster, had been quoted in a Los Angeles Times article as being in favor of the United States’ opening up discussions with Vietnam.

Lam said he did not know the two young men, but was there to see his attorney, Alan May, who also represents both defendants in the Van shooting. Lam is about to accept a part-time job with May’s office.

Some of Cooperman’s friends, who seek a connection between the Cooperman death and the Van shooting, believe that Lam’s appearance in court was not coincidental.

Provocative Patches

On Monday, May and his investigator, William L. Cassidy, showed up with blue blazers with patches which read, “Viet Cong Hunting Club.”

In a telephone interview, Roger Dittman, a physics professor at Cal State Fullerton and close friend of Cooperman, theorized that May was not really joking at all, adding: “I think there is a definite pattern to all this.”

Dittman expressed strong feelings about Lam’s release less than two years after the shooting.

“He served about the same amount of time as someone might get for refusing to register for the draft,” Dittman said. “That’s a tragic and sad commentary about this country.”

Cooperman, who was highly regarded by his colleagues, has been honored with a tutorial room named after him. Also, the university has a scholarship in his name. The office where he was shot is now occupied by two part-time instructors who were not on campus when the shooting occurred.

Probation Conditions

A condition of Lam’s probation is that he not try to contact the Coopermans and that he stay away from the college.

Lam told The Times that he does not know where or when he will return to school. But if he decides to enroll at an Orange County college, he said, he does not anticipate any problems because of the Cooperman case.

Lam was picked up at Chino by a close friend and returned to an apartment in Westminster that his mother had moved into while he was in Orange County Jail. He said his mother, who could not attend his trial because of poor health, has fawned over him since his return but has also given him a stern warning.

“She keeps telling me to not get myself in situations where I can mess up,” he said.