SAN JOSE
– Convicted hit man Gustavo Covian said Tuesday he won’t testify
in a trial for three alleged accomplices to murder – the same
murder a jury last year decided he committed for hire.
Police never found the body of Gilroy restaurateur Young Kim,
who disappeared in November 1998 at the age of 49.
SAN JOSE – Convicted hit man Gustavo Covian said Tuesday he won’t testify in a trial for three alleged accomplices to murder – the same murder a jury last year decided he committed for hire.
Police never found the body of Gilroy restaurateur Young Kim, who disappeared in November 1998 at the age of 49. Nevertheless, prosecutor Peter Waite successfully proved in early 2003 that Covian murdered Kim.
Waite is now trying to prove the following: that Kim’s wife Kyung wanted her husband dead and paid Covian for the killing, that Covian’s then-wife Maria Zapian brokered the hit and that Covian’s brother Ignacio helped with the murder.
Gustavo, 41, made a brief, special appearance in court Tuesday from the Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, where he is serving a life sentence without hope of parole. Dressed in a red, prison-issue jumpsuit, he asserted his Fifth-Amendment right against self-incrimination and was immediately escorted from the courtroom.
“I have my right not to say anything,” Covian said through a Spanish interpreter
in response to Judge Robert Am-brose’s question whether he would testify.
With Covian unavailable, Waite can use
testimony from witnesses like Adrian Vizcaino, Covian’s brother-in-law, who told a jury a year ago that Gustavo bragged to him about killing Young Kim. Some jurors who found Gustavo guilty told The Dispatch that Vizcaino’s testimony was the key for them.
Ignacio Covian, 32, was the only one of the defendants present in court with his brother Tuesday. Judge Ambrose excused Kyung Kim and Zapian for the morning because, Waite said, the women claimed they are afraid of Gustavo.
Kim, 48, has said Gustavo threatened to kill her two daughters if she didn’t pay him tens of thousands of dollars for killing her husband.
Zapian’s (formerly Covian’s) lawyer says Gustavo beat her and their children multiple times and that she lived in constant fear of him during their time together.
The Kim-Zapian-Covian trial has been going on for three weeks, but lawyers are still discussing which evidence to allow and which to suppress.
