Mothers Become Fixtures in Penalty Phase of Panah Trial : Courts: Emotional tensions intensify while the fate of man convicted in the sodomy-murder of 8-year-old Nicole Parker is decided.

They sit on opposite sides of the courtroom, acknowledging each other with cold stares. During breaks in testimony, they retire to different floors.

Since the beginning, there have been hard feelings between the mothers of the child victim and the convicted killer in the trial of Hooman Ashkan Panah, who may face the death penalty for the November, 1993, sodomy-murder of 8-year-old Nicole Parker.

The emotional tensions have only intensified at the final phase of the trial, at which it will be decided whether Panah should receive the death penalty. The testimony has become personal, shifting from the grim facts of violent death to Nicole’s background, and then to Panah’s.

And that has brought the mothers, Lori Parker and Mehri Monfared, from the spectator seats to the witness stand: Parker, a former beauty queen, to memorialize her daughter, and Monfared, a former refugee from Iran and television talk show host, to defend her son.

Although Panah and Nicole remain the focus of the trial, their mothers--and pain the mothers have laid bare on the witness stand--have become key fixtures in the daily proceedings. Each one has tearfully told the jury how she wanted only the best things for the children. They have both told how the killing and trial have left them with inconsolable grief.

Their comportment in the courtroom--sometimes a muttered cry, sometimes a gesture--has prompted Superior Court Judge Sandy R. Kriegler to admonish both women to control their emotions. He has imposed gag orders on them.

Parker has complained to her supporters about “hate looks” from Panah and his mother. She is upset that Panah is now being painted as a victim, when she has said, “I’m the victim here. My daughter’s dead. He’s alive.”

Panah’s defense had complained that the Parkers sit closer to the jury and therefore have an advantage. The defense has also pressed for language in the formal jury instructions that would admonish the panel not to consider whether one family “wins” over the other.

The tensions peaked late last week when Victoria Eckstone, who says she’s the mother of Panah’s 18-month-old daughter, Amanda, called Parker a slut during a confrontation in the courthouse cafeteria. Later, Eckstone wheeled her baby’s stroller past a friend of Parker’s and sniped, “At least my daughter is still alive.”

The judge barred Eckstone from the courthouse, calling her behavior “beyond the bounds of decency” and likely to incite violence. Later, however, she returned anyway, wheeling the baby past jurors in what the judge branded “a cheap trick.” The judge then had bailiffs eject her from the courtroom.

Monfared has repeatedly broken down in racking sobs in the courtroom, asserting that prejudice against Iranians makes it impossible for her son to receive a fair trial. After one outburst, deputies carried her from the courtroom. Then, when Panah protested, he was also kicked out.

“I have sympathy for her,” Parker said last week before the judge imposed the gag order. “I’ve fallen apart and I’ve yelled and I’ve screamed and I’ve thrown things. But I’ve done all of that at home.”

The penalty phase of the trial, along with heavy press coverage, has revealed as much about the two mothers as the killer and victim.

Lori Parker, a former Miss Tarzana who toured South Vietnam with the USO in the early 1970s, was separated from her husband, Edward, when Nicole disappeared. The split was amicable, though, and both parents remained involved in the activities of their children: Travis, 18; Chad, 16; Casey, 10, and Nicole, 8.

The Parkers had been foster parents. They adopted Casey and Nicole, born to a PCP-addicted mother, when Nicole was 4.

From the moment he was born in Tehran in 1971, Hooman Panah was everything to his mother. When Panah was not quite 4, she left her husband, who, she says, abused her. She raised him by herself. Just before Panah turned 14, she fled Iran with him so he wouldn’t have to fight in the war with Iraq.

“I tried to survive my life,” she testified Tuesday. “There was a lot of pressure on me. I was so tough on him because of my situation. Two shifts, working so hard. I didn’t have fun at all and didn’t think to know someone and get married. That’s a lot of pressure on me and I don’t know if I transferred it to my son.”

Ironically, her testimony might be what saves her son from death.

Defense attorneys Robert Sheahen and Bill Chais are trying to portray Panah as the victim of an abusive background and what Sheahen has called an “unnatural relationship with his mother.”

Monfared has described herself as a harsh disciplinarian who bit, slapped and beat her son as a boy, later sabotaged his relationships with young women and repeatedly threatened suicide when she didn’t get her way.

She has admitted accusing her son of being gay at age 10 and disbelieving him when he accused his grandfather of molesting him. She showered with him when he was young and slept in the same bed with him when he was an adolescent.

“I don’t call her a mother,” Parker sniffed before the gag order was imposed. “Mothers don’t act that way. . . . I would sleep on the floor before I would share a bed with my son. . . . If there was only enough hot water for one shower, my son would get the shower and I’d bathe in cold water.”

For Parker, the painful days spent in court have been a way of keeping her daughter alive and assuring that justice is done, especially now that the defense is trying to shift the sympathy toward Panah with his mother’s testimony.

“Being there keeps her alive in my heart,” Parker said of her daughter. “Nicole was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

For her part, Monfared took the witness stand Tuesday wearing a black-and-white button with a picture of herself with her son taken on the day he arrived in the United States in 1988. It said: “Together Forever.”