Guilty Verdict Sparks Angry Outburst : Court: ‘You’ll be haunted by that decision,’ defendant’s mother yells at jurors after his conviction in the murder of South County man he mistakenly thought was his father.

Amid outbursts from the 27-year-old defendant and his mother, a jury on Thursday found Sean Hirsch of Encino guilty of first-degree murder.

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Hirsch fatally shot John Francis McNamara, 46, in 1990 following disputes over money, the prosecution contended. At the time, Hirsch thought McNamara was his father, although DNA testing done during the course of the investigation showed he was not.

The verdict, after three days of deliberations, drew angry, tearful responses from Hirsch’s mother, Maureen Hirsch, also of Encino.

As the jury filed out of the courtroom, Maureen Hirsch yelled, “You’ll all be haunted by that decision . . . for the rest of your lives!”

Sean Hirsch began yelling at Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan Brown.

“You did it, Brown! You took my life away!” Then turning to his own attorney, he wept and said, “He lied. He cheated. He didn’t tell the truth. He made that stuff up.”

Orange County Superior Court Judge Jean Rheinheimer quieted the courtroom, which was full of other relatives of both Hirsch and McNamara.

The jury also found Hirsch guilty of the special circumstance of “lying in wait” and using a firearm. Because of the special circumstance, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole when he is sentenced July 21.

Hirsch reportedly shot McNamara in the abdomen at point-blank range as McNamara slept in his Rancho Santa Margarita condominium. McNamara, a divorced medical supplies salesman, managed to get to a phone and call 911. He died shortly afterward.

Investigators said at the time that they had few clues in the slaying. But nearly two years later, authorities found that DNA evidence linked Hirsch to the crime scene. Hirsch, a bank employee, was arrested.

During the monthlong trial, Brown argued that a rifle Hirsch allegedly stole from a friend’s home a few days before the murder was the one used to shoot McNamara. A neighbor of McNamara’s also said she saw a car that strongly resembled Hirsch’s Chevrolet Blazer parked near McNamara’s home that morning.

Brown also presented DNA evidence taken from a cigarette butt that Hirsch apparently discarded outside McNamara’s home near the parked Blazer. The genetic match between the saliva on the butt and samples taken from Hirsch could only have been made by one in 600,000 people, Brown said.

The DNA evidence also revealed that McNamara was not in fact Hirsch’s father, Brown said. The defense said Maureen Hirsch had believed that McNamara was her son’s father, and therefore so had Sean Hirsch. Defense attorney Jack M. Earley Brown said he does not know who Hirsch’s father is.

Earley told jurors that investigators had tampered with the cigarette evidence. He said a cigarette that Hirsch had smoked while being interviewed by authorities was planted by a sheriff’s deputy into an evidence bag. Brown called the charge “nonsense.”

Earley also said the prosecution lacked evidence for a sufficient motive for the killing. Although Hirsch and McNamara had quarreled in the past over thousands of dollars in loans Hirsch had made to McNamara, they were no longer fighting at the time, Earley insisted outside the courtroom.

Hirsch’s “life was going fine,” Earley said. “It was something that just made no sense,” he said.

But jurors said after the hearing that they were not bothered by the apparent lack of a strong motive. That “wasn’t a sticking point for us, because we had so much circumstantial evidence,” said jury forewoman Margaret Keck.

Besides DNA evidence, Keck said, ballistics tests of the rifle believed used in the killing figured strongly in the jury’s decision.

Brown congratulated the jurors and called them courageous.

“I am grateful to the jurors for giving us four weeks of their lives to resolve the facts in this case,” Brown said. “And they had the courage to make the call and voice their verdict in open court. So Godspeed to those jurors,” he said.