Crowder Convicted in Prom Killing

After deliberating just one day, a jury on Thursday convicted Paul M. Crowder of second-degree murder for the post-prom shooting of Crescenta Valley High School basketball star Berlyn F. Cosman.

“It was the only decision we could make,” jury foreman Paul H. Swan, 49, of Anaheim said outside court. “None of us liked it.”

Crowder, 19, who was also found guilty of using a firearm in the commission of a felony, faces a possible term of 17 years to life when Orange County Superior Court Judge Theodore E. Millard sentences him Nov. 1.

Cosman, 17, was shot once in the head on the morning of June 1 as she slept in a fold-out bed at the Crown-Sterling Suites Hotel in Anaheim. Cosman and a group of other La Crescenta teen-agers had attended their prom in Universal City and rented a limousine to go to Anaheim to spend the evening.

At the time of her death, Cosman was planning to attend Missouri Western State University this fall on a four-year scholarship.

Witnesses said Cosman was shot and killed after a night of partying at the Anaheim hotel where Crowder, a high school dropout, had gone with a .357 magnum handgun reportedly to protect a friend from another teen-ager.

Prosecutors had argued that a drunken Crowder shot Cosman because he was angry that she had ordered him out of her room so she could sleep. Crowder’s attorney, E. Bonnie Marshall, argued that Cosman’s death was a tragic accident, that an intoxicated Crowder had stumbled into the darkened room while trying to place his pistol into his waistband, discharging the weapon. Marshall said an appeal was likely.

The jurors began deliberating at 10:27 a.m. Wednesday. At 10:40 a.m. Thursday the foreman notified the judge that they had reached a verdict.

When the verdict was read, Crowder showed no emotion, but various members of his family wept quietly.

“He’s not a murderer,” said Crowder’s mother, Laura, tears rolling down her face. “He would not hurt anybody, I mean nobody. It was an accident.” She called the trial unfair, and said it began with the publicity surrounding the shooting.

“They already had him hung in the newspapers,” she said. “It’s just not fair. It’s not fair. . . .

“The comments that have been made about him are brutal and hurtful. . . . His family is torn apart about this thing,” she said, and then rushed away.

Marshall said she too was surprised by the verdict. While the death of Berlyn Cosman was tragic, Marshall said, she expected the jury to return a verdict of involuntary manslaughter.

Mark Cosman, the victim’s father, said he was “just grateful that my daughter, as a member of society, as a human being . . . was given justice.” He said he was pleased that “society . . . now came to her side to say that what happened to you was wrong, and we are going to punish whoever did this. And so Paul is going to have to pay for that now.”

With the trial behind him, Cosman said, “I feel like the funeral, when we are closing the casket.”

Crowder, a former high school football player who did not attend the prom, said he took the pistol and a shotgun to the party to serve as a bodyguard for a friend, Brian Birk.

Birk’s date for the prom had been threatened by an ex-boyfriend if she went to the dance with anyone else. The ex-boyfriend did not show up at the prom or the party, but did appear on the witness stand to confirm that he had previously beaten the woman and threatened her with death.

More than a dozen young people took the witness stand. At least half told the same general story, of Crowder waving the pistol around the party room all night, pointing it at various people--including himself--and at the furniture. They recounted similar versions of Crowder’s angry remarks directed at Cosman and her friend Jill Cappillero after they asked him to go to another room if he didn’t want to sleep.

“Kill the bitches,” a least one witness recalled Crowder saying.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Evans told jurors of a night of macho posturing, calling Crowder’s gun his “date.” He ridiculed Crowder’s testimony that his women friends liked being referred to as “bitches.”

Throughout her defense, Marshall implied that a beer-filled “party ball,” left on the floor of the room where Cosman slept, might have been the object that Crowder tripped on. But on the witness stand, Crowder made no mention of what caused him to trip.

Nonetheless, in her closing argument to the jury, Marshall suggested again that the party ball could have been the cause.

The tripping story, Evans said, was “silly . . . preposterous . . . unreasonable” and an insult to the jurors’ intelligence.

At Crescenta Valley High, Principal Ken Biermann said he purposely had not “followed the trial very closely, but from the evidence that I have heard and read about, I think that the judgment is probably fair. What happened (Cosman’s death) was wrong, very wrong.”

Times staff writers Matt Lait, Gebe Martinez and Martha L. Willman contributed to this story.