A LOOK AHEAD * The victim of the slaying was the son of a beloved TV star, but the trial of the accused will reflect the gritty reality of street crime as . . . Cosby Case Is No Celebrity Circus

It may lack the circus sensationalism of the O.J. Simpson criminal case, but the Ennis Cosby murder trial will have a real-life flavor that most high-profile cases seldom capture.

That is the picture emerging from a court hearing last week and from evidence that has leaked out since the morning the 27-year-old son of entertainer Bill Cosby was shot down early last year.

With jailhouse snitches instead of Brian “Kato” Kaelin and low-key public defenders instead of the “Dream Team,” this trial will come closer to a typical murder case than do most cases that capture national attention.

With television cameras barred from the Santa Monica courtroom, the trial, which will begin June 16, loses the splash that comes with other high-profile cases.

“It has all the ingredients of your classic murder case,” said Gigi Gordon, a veteran Santa Monica defense attorney, echoing the views of trial participants and dozens of other lawyers.

It will be filled with the drama and horror found in other trials that involve the rich or famous, and it has already caught the attention of national tabloids.

Yet, the trial will reveal circumstances tragically common in all walks of life. Every motorist’s worst nightmare--a flat tire on a busy freeway, a dark and cold night, a gunman in a knit cap--became real when Cosby’s assailant shot him in the head at nearly point-blank range on a side road off the San Diego Freeway. The precipitating crime--thought to be attempted robbery--is the dread of every convenience store clerk. And the death of a handsome, young man with noble ambitions at a time when opportunities are blooming evokes universal sympathy.

Although his father’s fortune gave him a privileged life, Ennis Cosby overcame a challenge most people are spared. He learned to deal with dyslexia, a learning disability, and was working toward a doctorate in special education at Columbia University in New York.

He was in Los Angeles on a two-week vacation from those studies when he was killed.

Cosby was driving to the home of a friend, Stephanie Crane, a 47-year-old Sherman Oaks woman, shortly before 2 a.m., when his $137,000 Mercedes-Benz blew a tire. Just 10 minutes from Crane’s home, he pulled off the freeway onto a side road and called her to meet him so he could use her car lights to see while he was fixing the flat.

It is not known if Cosby and Crane knew that somebody else was watching them from not far away.

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Crane has said she was sitting in her car when a man in a light colored knit cap walked up. Frightened, she drove down the road a short distance, but returned a few minutes later to find Cosby lying dead on the pavement.

What led to the shooting will be for the jury to decide. But a compilation of information gleaned from court records and news accounts paint the following scenario:

Eli Zacharia, 24, and Sara Ann Peters, 22, both of Huntington Beach, have told police they stopped at a park-and-ride about 450 feet from where Cosby was found to use the phone to call a drug dealer.

They said they were with 18-year-old Mikail Markhasev, a wiry North Hollywood resident.

Markhasev had immigrated to the United States with his mother eight years earlier from Ukraine, where his father had abandoned them. He had done well in Los Alamitos and Reseda high schools, but friends say that he became associated with gangs. He spent a brief stint in a juvenile detention camp in 1995 for an offense that has not been revealed.

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On the morning of Jan. 16, he saw Cosby and told his companions he was going to rob him, Zacharia and Peters have reportedly told police.

Moments later, they heard a noise. They have told police that Markhasev came running back to his companions, and they drove away.

Crane, Cosby’s friend, gave police a detailed description of the man who approached her, and Markhasev’s appearance is similar. But in a blow to the prosecution’s case, she later failed to pick Markhasev out of a lineup.

But the prosecution soon would get another break--an informant who went to the National Enquirer to earn a $100,000 reward for leads in the case. The informant told police that he and another friend of Markhasev helped him search for a gun he said he had thrown away the night of the shooting. They failed to find it, but one of them said Markhasev said he had “shot a n-----.”

They showed the area to police, who found the gun, a .38-caliber pistol, wrapped in a dark knit cap, which prosecutors say they have linked to Markhasev.

Markhasev has said he did not kill Cosby, and like the overwhelming majority of criminal defendants in American courtrooms, he will go to court represented by public defenders.

Although they don’t have the fame and flamboyance of Dream Team members Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and F. Lee Bailey, Markhasev’s lawyers have earned respect in the legal community.

“They both have very good reputations,” Gordon said.

Henry Hall has been representing indigent people as a public defender for nearly 25 years.

“He is well-respected, and has a statewide reputation,” Gordon said.

His partner, Harriet Hawkins, has been a criminal defense lawyer for 10 years, working in the federal public defender’s office before joining the county four years ago.

Both work in the alternate public defender’s office.

On the other side of the aisle will be Anne Ingalls, who is known as a soft-spoken but tough prosecutor. She was in the hard-core gang division for eight years before she was assigned to the major crimes section in 1994.

Despite the national attention the case has drawn, it is not likely that the media will be so entranced with the lawyers that they will analyze their hairstyles or comment on their lapel pins as it did the Simpson trial.

As tragic as the Cosby case is, the circumstances are much more pedestrian than in such high-profile cases as the Menendez trial, in which the two preppy brothers of a Beverly Hills family killed their parents with shotguns.

Nor is the evidence as tantalizing. There are no Bruno Magli shoes or wailing dogs in the night.

The prosecution in the Cosby case will probably not call the kind of affluent, well-tailored witnesses who came to the Simpson and Menendez trials clothed in respectability.

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In contrast, many witnesses against Markhasev will come from the seamier side of life, which is typical in most murder trials. Prosecutors probably will call jailhouse informants and witnesses with checkered pasts or with pending criminal cases.

For example, prosecutors may call two witnesses who attended a party with Markhasev at a nearby house just before Cosby’s killing. Both are facing felony drug charges. Hall and Hawkins probably will explore those charges thoroughly in front of the jury to raise doubts about the credibility of the two witnesses’ testimony.

They also will vigorously attack the credibility of testimony from jailhouse informants, particularly one who delivered some supposedly incriminating letters from Markhasev.

Defense lawyers will try to show that the informant, who has a forgery conviction, faked the letters in the hope of getting a favorable plea bargain from the prosecutor in his own case.

The use of witnesses with criminal records should not be a shock to anyone, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for district attorney’s office.

In any trial, key witnesses frequently are criminals because the defendants associate with other criminals.

“This case has more of the feel of a gang case,” she said. “Members of street gangs hang out with members of street gangs.”