Lam Shooting Account Disputed by Attorneys

The diagram at right shows the layout of Prof. Edward Lee Cooperman’s office--Room 665B of Cal State Fullerton’s Science Building--as Fullerton police found it after Cooperman was fatally shot.

Minh Van Lam, charged with murdering Cooperman, said in a videotaped re-enactment of the shooting that he was in the green chair, pulled up to face Cooperman, who sat in the blue chair against the north wall.

Prosecutor Mel Jensen has challenged that account, introducing medical testimony describing how blood would spurt copiously from a neck wound such as Cooperman received. Jensen noted that the green chair had no blood on it, nor was there blood in front of the blue chair, on Lam’s shirt or the lap of his trousers. So how, Jensen asked, could Cooperman have been shot there?

Defense attorney Alan May contends that the green chair has no blood on it because Lam actually was in the orange chair (facing the blue chair then). There is blood on the base of the orange chair, on the bottoms of Lam’s trouser legs and on the bottom part of the side of the desk.

All those blood marks are consistent, May claims, with the medical testimony of how the blood would flow from Cooperman’s wound. The reason Lam said on the videotape that he was sitting in the green chair, May contends, is that in his re-enactment he was grabbing any available chair to demonstrate what happened.

The defense argues that this is the only logical explanation of how the orange chair, usually behind Cooperman’s desk, got into the corner. (May says paramedics must have shoved it there from where Lam had it in front of the blue chair, so they could get to Cooperman’s body.)

Jensen, however, contends that there is blood on the orange chair because Cooperman was seated in it behind his desk when he was shot.

After the shooting, according to Jensen, the orange chair could have gotten into the corner any number of ways. The paramedics could have placed it there, he says, or Cooperman himself might have pushed it into the corner as he struggled after the shooting.