DUI Driver Guilty in Fatal Crash

A Beverly Hills man with eight drunk-driving convictions narrowly escaped a murder conviction Wednesday for a 1998 fatal accident when a single holdout juror forced the panel to accept conviction on the lesser charge of manslaughter instead.

Johnny Castro, 37, now faces a maximum of 10 years in prison, compared with the 15 to life sentence he faced on the second-degree murder charge. He will be sentenced next month.

“It’s not enough,” Zhilla Koosh, the victim’s mother, said outside the San Fernando courtroom, her face red from crying. “We were hoping for murder.”

The verdict, reached after nearly four days of deliberations, was unexpected for a trial that had centered on the issue of whether the defendant was driving.

Castro’s lawyer, Larry Boyle, contended that another man the defendant met at a bar was behind the wheel and fled after the accident. He called the defendant’s wife and his brother, as well as a passer-by who saw two people in Castro’s car, as witnesses to corroborate the defense.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Asari pointed out injuries and damage to the car and offered the testimony of an off-duty police officer who witnessed the accident to prove the defendant was driving. He also outlined Castro’s driving record as evidence that he knew driving drunk was dangerous and didn’t care, making the fatal accident a murder.

One juror, a Northridge woman who declined to give her name, said all but one juror agreed that Castro was driving.

“We all felt the evidence was there,” she said. “We felt he was guilty. It was just one juror.”

After days of discussion, tension mounted and the panel moved on to the issue of whether the crime was a murder or manslaughter, she said.

The majority agreed that the crime was a murder, but the holdout said he would only agree to convict if they settled on manslaughter, the juror said. She said she agreed because she didn’t want to have a hung jury.

“I feel absolutely horrible,” she said. “He had made up his mind. There was nothing that would have made a difference.”

On Jan. 11, 1998, Castro rear-ended a U-Haul trailer attached to a Jeep Wrangler on the Golden State Freeway, about a mile south of the Hasley Canyon Road offramp. Witnesses said he had been driving his Nissan 300ZX at nearly 100 mph, authorities said. The Jeep flipped, fatally injuring Mahdad Koosh, 22, of Westlake Village.

A blood test showed that Castro’s blood-alcohol content was 0.17%, well over the .08% legal limit. Castro was driving to West Hollywood, where he lived at the time, after drinking at a Bakersfield bar.

According to Koosh’s family, the engineer had landed a job at NASA in Huntington Beach and went on a solo cross-country drive before starting the job. He was in the last leg of the tour when he was killed.