Jury Told Girl’s Death May Have Been Accidental : Courts: Sex acts with child, 8, may have been taped, prosecutor says. Defense counters they may have occurred after she died.

A prosecutor told a Superior Court jury Thursday that Hooman Askhan Panah probably didn’t mean to kill an 8-year-old neighbor, theorizing instead that Panah inadvertently took Nicole Parker’s life while videotaping sex acts with the child.

“It’s possible he didn’t intend to kill her,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter S. Berman said. “It’s possible this started as a seduction. He wanted to tape it and keep it as part of his collection.”

If a videotape existed, it never was found. Nor were Nicole’s clothes or a softball glove she was playing with outside Panah’s Woodland Hills apartment minutes before she disappeared at mid-morning on Nov. 20, 1993.

She was dead by 1 p.m., the prosecutor said.

Berman told jurors that Panah, 23, probably got rid of the child’s clothes and an incriminating tape before he went to work that afternoon. But he was unable to dispose of the child’s body before her father, who lived nearby, noticed she was missing and called police.

Panah never returned to his apartment because police set up a command post at the complex to organize the search for Nicole, Berman said.

The prosecutor publicly voiced this theory, long the subject of speculation, for the first time during closing arguments at Panah’s capital murder trial.

Panah is charged with murder with special circumstances that could carry the death penalty. He is accused of murdering Nicole while committing other crimes--sodomy, lewd acts with a child under 14 and oral copulation.

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Berman told jurors that, legally, it doesn’t matter whether Panah meant for Nicole to die because Panah killed her while committing the sex crimes. The physical evidence includes body fluids left behind on a bloody bedsheet, a robe and a piece of toilet paper. They match Panah’s and Nicole’s blood types.

Defense attorney Robert Sheahen told jurors the prosecution hadn’t proved its case, didn’t present more conclusive DNA evidence and failed to investigate other possible suspects. He questioned why Panah, whom he described as “a college kid with a normal, active sex life,” would want to “go after a little girl.”

Sheahen also told jurors that the sex acts may have occurred after Nicole died, a theory designed to spare Panah from the special circumstances that carry the death penalty.

“No matter how offensive, no matter how extremely repugnant sodomy with a dead person might be, it is not a special circumstance,” Sheahen argued.

But Berman told the jury that Nicole suffered injuries that caused her to bruise and bleed--clear evidence that she was alive when sexually assaulted.

The attorneys argued their cases in a packed courtroom where emotions ran so high that Judge Sandy R. Kreigler had to admonish spectators to restrain themselves from openly reacting to what the lawyers said.

Nicole’s parents, Edward and Lori Parker, sat stoically in the front row of the courtroom as the evidence of how their daughter died was discussed in graphic detail.

The second-grader’s body was discovered in Panah’s closet 36 hours after Edward Parker reported her missing.

The child’s bruised body was the most compelling evidence against Panah, Berman said. “It’s like a smoking gun,” the prosecutor told the jury. ‘You have a body in his closet, in his suitcase.”

Berman contended that the physical evidence showed that Panah first forced Nicole to perform oral sex on him, violated her with a foreign object, then sodomized her. Bruises and tears on her body showed the force he used.

“It was done to satisfy his own lust,” the prosecutor said.

She died slowly and painfully, some time after Panah had sodomized her, Berman said.

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After she died, he said, Panah wrapped Nicole’s nude, bruised body in the bloody bedsheet, stuffed it in a suitcase, and hid it in his closet, under two other suitcases and a pile of laundry.

“For 13 months, Mr. Panah has enjoyed the mantle of the presumption of innocence,” Berman said, imploring jurors, “You are now in the position to brand him for what he is, the murderer of a helpless 8-year-old child--who satisfied his own lust, who treated her as if she wasn’t human, who gratified himself sexually with a victim who was about 4 feet, 3 inches tall and about 45 pounds.”

Jury deliberations begin today.