Crowder Found Guilty of 2nd-Degree Murder : Trial: Jury takes just one day to reach a verdict in the fatal post-prom shooting of Berlyn Cosman in Anaheim. Foreman says ‘none of us liked’ the decision.

A 19-year-old high school dropout was convicted of second-degree murder Tuesday in the post-prom shooting death of Crescenta Valley High School basketball star Berlyn F. Cosman following a night of partying in an Anaheim hotel.

A Superior Court jury took just one day to find Paul M. Crowder guilty in the death of Cosman, a popular 17-year-old graduating senior from La Crescenta who was shot once in the head while she slept on the morning of June 1.

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

Cosman was shot 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 the prom in Universal City and rented a limousine to come to Anaheim to spend the evening.

At the time of her death, Cosman was looking forward to attending Missouri Western State College 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, reportedly to protect a friend from another teen-ager.

Prosecutors had argued that a drunken Crowder had spent the evening recklessly waving the gun around the hotel and was mad at Cosman because she had ordered him out of her room so she could sleep. Crowder’s attorney, E. Bonnie Marshall, countered that Cosman’s death was a tragic accident, that an intoxicated Crowder had stumbled into the darkened room while trying to replace his pistol into his waistband, discharging the weapon.

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, as tears rolled 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 post-prom night shooting.

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

Laura Crowder said she had no opportunity to talk to her son after the verdict.

“They don’t let me talk to him, they don’t let me touch him, they don’t let me do anything. I have no rights as a mother,” she said.

“I just know what I know about Paul, and I just know that he would never hurt anybody. He wouldn’t. The comments that have been made about him are brutal and hurtful. . . . His family is torn apart about this thing,” she said.

Marshall, Crowder’s attorney, said she too was surprised by the verdict and said an appeal is likely. While the death of Berlyn Cosman was tragic, Marshall said she expected the jury to return a lesser 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.”

He declined to say what kind of sentence he would like to see for Crowder.

“I would be seeing it through the eyes of grief, through the eyes of anger, and so it’s probably not a good idea for me to make a decision on that.”

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

Crowder, who did not attend the prom, said he brought the .357 and a 12-gauge shotgun to the party to serve as a bodyguard for his 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--friends, acquaintances and classmates of both Cosman and Crowder. Most admitted to lying or misleading law enforcement officials and the grand jury following the shooting and gave a variety of reasons for their conduct--fear, confusion, drugs, alcohol and sleeplessness. A forensic psychiatrist suggested that it might have been hysterical amnesia provoked by the trauma of seeing their dying friend.

At least half told of Crowder’s waving the pistol around the party room all night, dry-firing it, pointing it at various people--including himself--and pieces of furniture. They recounted similar versions of Crowder’s angry remarks directed at Jill Cappillero and Cosman after they asked him to go to another room if he didn’t want to sleep.

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

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans attacked Crowder for a night of macho posturing, calling Crowder’s gun his “date,” and ridiculed his 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 Crowder tripped on. But on the witness stand Crowder made no mention of whatever caused him to trip.

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

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

The jurors began deliberating at 10:27 a.m. Wednesday and in the afternoon sent a note to the judge asking for further instruction on the concept of “implied malice,” a key element in Evans’ case for a second-degree murder conviction.

Millard explained again that, under implied malice, it is not necessary to prove that the defendant intended to kill the victim. It was sufficient to prove that the killing took place as the result of another illegal act. Evans said brandishing a loaded .357 magnum was that crime.

After the verdict, jurors told Marshall that once they agreed on the implied malice of entering the room with the gun, it made little difference whether the gun discharged accidentally as Crowder tripped.

Swan, the jury foreman, said some jurors thought that the shooting was partially “an accident.” The defense’s attempt to prove the shooting was an accident through evidence on the trajectory of the bullet “didn’t enter into the decision,” he said. Fighting back tears of his own, Swan said, “I don’t think anyone thinks he did it intentionally.”

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 was wrong, very wrong.”

Crowder “deserves every bit of what he gets,” said Nick Aboachgian, 19, a senior at Crescenta Valley who knew both students only in passing. “Taking a gun to a prom night is stupid. It’s a night where everyone is supposed to have fun.”

Patricia Parr, who had taught Spanish to both Cosman and Crowder, said, “I don’t want to say I am pleased, but I feel that this was a fair verdict.”

Parr said she “was stunned” when she learned about the death of Cosman, whom she had taught for three years. “She was a beautiful girl, and I always felt that she was just in with the wrong group. I think it was an unusual circumstance that happened that one particular evening. She just didn’t fit; she didn’t belong there.”

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