Countywide : Aunt Asks Mercy for Killer of Parents, Brother

Sobbing and asking for mercy, the aunt of a man convicted of murdering his parents and brother begged jurors Tuesday to spare him from a death sentence because her family has been ravaged by loss and can bear no more.

“A third of my family is gone and killing him is not going to bring them back,” a weeping Lorraine DeGroot said as she nodded toward her 23-year-old nephew, Edward Charles III, who was found guilty of murdering his immediate family in their Fullerton home and torching their bodies. “I don’t want to lose another member of my family. Enough.”

Charles faces execution or life in prison without parole for the stabbing and bludgeoning of his father and younger sibling and the apparent strangulation of his mother in November 1994. All three bodies were found in a flaming car parked at a La Mirada school.

DeGroot echoed earlier testimony that portrayed the killing as an act driven by envy and hate. Charles’ brother, Danny, 19, was an aspiring opera singer and the family’s pride, while Charles was a gas station employee who felt, attorneys have argued, that he could never live up to the exacting expectations of his father, Edward Charles II, 55.

“I think [Charles] kind of gave up, he felt like, ‘I can’t do anything right to please this man,’ ” DeGroot, told jurors Tuesday during the penalty phase of the trial in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana.

DeGroot, 43, said the parents--including her sister Dolores, 47--tended to be “overwhelming” in praise of their younger, favored son.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David Linden Brent contended during the trial that the heat of Charles’ sibling jealously was fueled by perceived parental slights, such as their refusal to give him $50,000 to buy a gas station and their disdain for his then-fiancee, Tiffany Bowen.

On the stand Tuesday, Bowen described Charles as a caring person who doted on her and was deeply concerned about his father’s battles with cancer.

Bowen carefully avoided eye contact with Charles and looked to the gallery for support from her new boyfriend. The former model and actress testified that she broke up with Charles at the Orange County Jail in December.

“The stories he was telling me kept changing,” Bowen testified. “I felt he thought I couldn’t be trusted. . . . I didn’t know what to believe.”

The defendant’s maternal grandfather, Bernard Severino, 73, also testified Tuesday on behalf of the defense and described Charles as his “favorite grandson.”

“We were very close,” the grandfather said.

Police say Charles wrote a jailhouse letter plotting the death of his grandfather to make authorities think the original killer remained on the loose.

Severino testified earlier that his grandson also called him from jail and asked him to take responsibility for the slayings, saying, “You’ve lived your life.”