Jury convicts burglar of killing elderly Encino man during home invasion
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After finding his friend Stuart Herman sprawled on the kitchen floor of his Encino home with a gunshot wound to the head, John Berliner tried for more than five minutes to revive him as a 911 operator offered coaching on CPR.
An audio recording of Berliner’s anguished 911 call, in which he is heard counting out chest compressions, provided an emotional climax to the recent trial of the man charged with the shooting, which left Herman dead despite his friend’s efforts to save him.
On March 18, a San Fernando Valley jury convicted Timothy Kirkpatrick of killing Herman, 80, during what police and prosecutors believe was a home burglary gone awry. Kirkpatrick was found guilty on all charges: first-degree murder, burglary, assault with a firearm and illegal possession of a firearm. He and an alleged accomplice, Hakop Keloyan, were arrested in March 2022, roughly two months after the slaying.
Before the start of trial, Keloyan pleaded guilty on March 10 to two gun charges and entered a no-contest plea to additional charges that included burglary, armed assault, and identity theft.
Both men are expected to be sentenced in April.
City and police leaders announced double-digit declines in homicides compared with 2023, including a halving of gang-related slayings, but the recent election results show public safety remains a concern.
Deputy Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ranna Jahanshahi said Herman and Berliner were best friends who met when Herman married Berliner’s sister. Their friendship survived the couple’s divorce, and when Berliner lived abroad he came back to L.A. to check on his elderly companion.
An attorney for Kirkpatrick argued that there was no physical evidence tying his client to the crime. The defense called no witnesses during the trial.
In March 2022, Berliner stayed at Herman’s English Tudor house in the 4500 block of Densmore Avenue. “They were going to catch up on however long it had been since these two best friends had spoken,” Jahanshahi said.
On the day of the shooting, the two friends had just returned from grocery shopping when they noticed an “unfamiliar, brand-new looking BMW in the driveway,” Jahanshahi said.
Finding it odd, Berliner told investigators that he proceeded to check the backyard and the pool area before going inside the home to search the rooms.
As he made his way through the house, Berliner told police, he noted that many doors had been left ajar, which was unusual because Herman insisted on keeping doors closed to keep his cats from escaping.
“So with every door that John saw was open, he got a little bit more concerned,” she said.
Berliner recalled seeing the barrel of a gun protruding from behind a door and a male voice shouting “We’re the police!” and instructing him to get down on the ground. As he did so, the gunman pistol-whipped him before running downstairs.
After a few moments, Berliner heard a gunshot.
“Nothing else. No words said, no screaming, no nothing,” Jahanshahi said. An autopsy found marks on Herman’s face, torso and arms that the medical examiner said indicated he had been shot at close range.
Berliner told police he tried to take video of the suspect he saw and an accomplice fleeing in the white BMW X6, but his hands were shaking so badly that he could only manage to snap a photograph with his cellphone.
He told investigators that he remembered the shooter as a tall, slender man with a mustache and arms covered in tattoos.
The department is down hundreds of officers from its 2019 ranks and projects that it will continue to dwindle in fiscal year 2025.
Investigators obtained a warrant for information from Google to identify electronic devices that had been in the area at the time of the murder, which eventually led them to Kirkpatrick and Keloyan.
The men were arrested in late April 2022. Kirkpatrick was taken into custody after barricading himself inside a home in Simi Valley when police arrived with a search warrant. Keloyan was caught later the same day during a police raid of a Sherman Oaks residence where they found an illegal marijuana grow operation in an underground garage on the property.
Prosecutors said surveillance video from a Range Rover dealership showed Kirkpatrick and Keloyan near Herman’s home around the time of the incident. They were also captured on video driving past the property, which prosecutors said suggested they were casing the location.
Jahanshahi said in an interview after the verdict was announced that the government pursued the more serious charge of first-degree murder based on the brutality of the crime and the close proximity at which Herman was shot, which “shows it was intentful and purposeful.”
After hearing the evidence against Kirkpatrick, the jury got its decision right, she said.
“Anything less than first-degree would’ve been an injustice,” Jahanshahi said, though “it’s not going to change the trauma that the surviving victim has gone through.”
