A man who was already serving time in state prison when he was charged with the 1983 killing of a single mother in Los Angeles was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for her murder.<\/p>\n
A downtown Los Angeles jury deliberated about 45 minutes Aug. 28 before finding Teddy Jerome Young, now 63, guilty of first-degree murder for the January 1983 shotgun slaying of 37-year-old Alice Faye Chatman.<\/p>\n
Jurors also found true the special-circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a kidnapping and murder during the commission of a rape, along with an allegation that he personally used a shotgun during the crime.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Eleanor J. Hunter denied the defense\u2019s motion for a new trial and called the woman\u2019s killing a \u201cparticularly gruesome crime,\u201d noting the \u201cindignity\u201d she suffered in the last moments of her life.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles police had said Young \u2014 who was serving a 62-year-to-life sentence \u2014 was linked to DNA from a sexual assault kit collected from the victim after testing in 2014 and 2016.<\/p>\n
Shortly before the sentence was imposed, Deputy District Attorney Negin Mostadim read statements from three of the victim\u2019s siblings.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a family, we have never stopped hoping and believing that the day would arrive when the person responsible for this terrible crime would be caught and held accountable,\u201d her sister, Cheryl Burton, said.<\/p>\n
The victim\u2019s brother, Michael Chatman, said in his statement, \u201cLiving for so many years without answers, without justice was its own kind of torture. \u2026 This crime shattered out family. I wished our parents were alive to witness that justice has been served.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another brother, Billy Chatman Jr., said, \u201cIt is difficult not to think of the terror my sister experienced when she was being kidnapped, dragged away, ultimately raped and murdered by a wild animal,\u201d adding that he believed that was the best way to describe the defendant.<\/p>\n
In her closing argument, the prosecutor told jurors that the victim was an \u201ceasy target\u201d and was vulnerable as she walked to a bus stop on her way to work and that Young targeted her because he wanted her purse.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor alleged that the defendant \u2014 who lived within a block of the victim \u2014 wasn\u2019t able to easily get her purse away from her and took her to a house that he knew was abandoned, where he raped her then shot her in the back. Mostadim said Young killed her because he didn\u2019t want her to be able to leave and tell people what had happened to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t need to kill her. He could have left her there,\u201d the prosecutor said.<\/p>\n
Defense attorney Glen Kiyohara countered that the crux of the case was identification.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho committed this crime? Who killed Ms. Chatman?\u201d he asked jurors.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s attorney said the DNA sample from the sexual assault kit was a \u201clow-level DNA sample\u201d and a \u201cdegraded DNA sample,\u201d and questioned what had happened to it between 1983 and 2014. He also asked jurors to question whether it really showed Young\u2019s DNA profile.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t just blindly take these results \u2026 Simply put, the DNA evidence in this case is based upon a false assumption \u2026 that there was only one donor,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are no eyewitnesses, there\u2019s no video.\u201d<\/p>\n
The prosecutor said in her rebuttal argument that the defense was \u201ctrying to convince you that it\u2019s not him,\u201d and maintained that Young\u2019s DNA was detected in semen from the DNA sample \u201cbecause he raped her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deputy district attorney told jurors that for 40 years the defendant has not been \u201cheld accountable,\u201d saying \u201cthat stops now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Police said shortly after the case was filed that the victim was the single mother of a 13-year-old son and worked full-time to try to provide a better life for him. They described Young as having a \u201clong criminal history\u201d that included arrests for a series of robberies \u2014 most recently in 1997 in Riverside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who was already serving time in state prison when he was charged with the 1983 killing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[27931,683,1436,23588,48,52,51,47,50,49,6316,1331,1628],"class_list":["post-41172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-27931","tag-angeles","tag-case","tag-cold","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mother","tag-murder","tag-sentenced"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}