Stepson ‘Very Unhappy,’ Ridder Tells Jury

Daniel H. Ridder, chairman of the Long Beach Press Telegram, testified Monday at his stepson’s trial for attempted murder that the young man “lost all direction and became very unhappy” after he realized that he would not be a professional tennis player.

“Tennis was his whole life,” a tearful Ridder said of his 24-year-old stepson, Bradley Ackerman, who never fulfilled the promise he had shown as a national teen-age tennis champion. “He started talking about whether life was worth living or not.”

Ackerman is charged with shooting his former girlfriend, Julie Alban, in the back as she slept June 8, before turning the gun on himself. Ackerman survived with no permanent injuries but Alban, 23, was left paralyzed.

Contradicting earlier testimony by the young woman that the shooting took place shortly after she had rejected Ackerman’s proposal of marriage, Ridder said marriage between the two had been pushed not by Ackerman but by Alban’s father, Dr. Seymour Alban, a prominent Long Beach surgeon.

‘He Wasn’t Ready’

“He loved her, but he wasn’t ready to get married,” the newspaper executive said of his stepson, who lives across the street from his former girlfriend. “He felt that Dr. Alban was pressuring him and he didn’t know how to handle it.”

The defense contends that Ackerman took an overdose of Valium and intended to kill only himself, having no motive or desire to harm Julie Alban. Ackerman and his attorneys have characterized the shooting as an attempted suicide brought on by deep depression stemming from his failure to fulfill his early promise as a tennis player, large gambling debts and uncertainty about his future.

Ackerman testified last week that he does not remember the shooting.

In other testimony Monday, a pharmacologist called by the defense said large doses of Valium can cause temporary blackouts during which a user can experience uncharacteristic rage and act as if in a trance.

“It’s almost certain he was in a blackout state,” Dr. Malcolm Lader said of Ackerman. “He would not have been capable of any logical thought, nor any sense of the future.”