Teen Gets 19-to-Life Sentence for Killing Girl : Courts: He was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting a high school basketball star at a party after her prom. Judge calls him ‘a time bomb waiting to go off.’

SANTA ANA —  Paul Michael Crowder, a 19-year-old dropout convicted of second-degree murder in the post-prom shooting death of a Crescenta Valley High School basketball star, was sentenced Friday to 19 years to life in prison by a judge who called him “a time bomb waiting to go off.”

Berlyn F. Cosman, 17, was shot in the head while she slept in a darkened room of the Crown Sterling Suites Hotel in Anaheim on June 1 after her school’s prom at Universal City and an all-night party.

The sentence was just a year short of the maximum allowed by law, attorneys said.

Rejecting Crowder’s contention that he tripped and accidentally fired his gun, Orange County Superior Court Judge Theodore E. Millard sentenced him to 15 years to life on the second-degree murder conviction, as required by law. He also added four years--of a maximum five--for using a weapon, a .357-magnum pistol, in the slaying.

Despite pleas from Crowder’s defense attorney, E. Bonnie Marshall, Millard ordered that the sentences be served consecutively, meaning that he will not be eligible for parole for 12 years.

The judge also refused a request from the defense to allow Crowder to serve part of his sentence in the California Youth Authority, even though Assistant Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans did not oppose the motion.

Instead, Millard ordered that Crowder be sent to the state prison at Chino.

Crowder, dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit and black-and-white running shoes, showed no emotion when the sentence was read, or when he was taken in handcuffs from the courtroom.

The defendant’s mother, Laura Crowder, said she and her son were ready for the severe sentence.

“The way the judge was going and the courts were going, we were ready,” she said outside the courtroom. “I know my son, and I know the kind of person he is, and he’s not a cold-blooded murderer, the way the judge portrayed him.”

Crowder’s mother said that she felt for the Cosmans. “I really do. So does Paul. . . . But it was an accident and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t bring her back.”

Mark Cosman, Berlyn’s father, who attended the sentencing with his wife, said that “as good as justice can do, it was done.”

His voice breaking, Cosman added: “I can’t hold my daughter any more. . . . In something like this, nobody wins. My daughter is dead. We have a young man that’s going to spend a lot of his life in prison. Nobody won here. We’re just very, very sad. . . . We’re exhausted. We’re glad that it’s over.”

Asked if he had any advice for other parents, Cosman said: “While you have your children, if you can love them and be with them as much as you can, then you don’t have regrets for how you participated with them in life. And her mom and I don’t have any regrets for the 17 years that we had our daughter.”

Defense attorney Marshall said she was not surprised by Millard’s denial of her motions or the stiff sentence, saying “that’s where he has been coming from since the inception” of the trial.

She insisted that her case--that Crowder tripped in the darkened room, discharging the pistol in a “tragic accident”--was “not a made-up defense.”

After the sentencing, Marshall said she was going directly from the courtroom to file an appeal based on one juror’s contention that other jurors were “ganging up” on her during deliberations.

Evans, the prosecutor, said the sentence was “just what I expected. It’s appropriate. I think the judge took into consideration the mitigating factors when he cut off a little bit of time on the enhancement, as he should have. It’s a sad case. . . . The judge has sent out a message, that that kind of conduct is going to be dealt with the way the law says it’s going to be dealt with.”

In commenting on the case, the judge said Crowder’s story that he fired accidentally after he tripped, “defies common sense and logic.”

“It is pretty clear that Mr. Crowder took guns to the party, that he waved them around, pretty clear he was drinking. . . . He was a time bomb ready to go off, and unfortunately he went off that morning.”