CALIFORNIA BRIEFING / LOS ANGELES

By Harriet Ryan

June 18, 2009 12 AM PT

The attorney for a hip-hop artist accused of beating a jazz pianist to death in what has been called a real-life version of the film “Crash” asked Wednesday that charges be reduced from murder to manslaughter.

In papers filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the lawyer suggested that Swedish artist David Jassy, 35, acted in self-defense when he punched and kicked John Osnes, 55, during a November confrontation in a Hollywood crosswalk.

“A motorist is not required to sit passively in his vehicle while a pedestrian strikes the vehicle and yells at him, and wait and see if the stranger’s anger escalates,” lawyer Alec Rose wrote.

Witnesses said Osnes, a pedestrian, struck the hood of Jassy’s SUV after it came close to hitting him. The witnesses said Jassy got out, punched Osnes, kicked him in the head and drove over him.

-- Harriet Ryan

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Harriet Ryan

Harriet Ryan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2008, she has written about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Tom Girardi, and institutions, including USC, the State Bar of California, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with colleagues Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle in 2019. She and Hamilton won the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability in 2023. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

CALIFORNIA BRIEFING / LOS ANGELES

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