Sharon Conner found her eighteen-year-old son, Alan, shot dead in the parking lot of an Aurora King Soopers on October 15, 1998. Two years and two months later, she told an Arapahoe County jury what she'd seen that morning.
She didn't look at her son's accused murderer. Terry Mosley Jr., now twenty, sat just a few feet away, behind the defendant's table. "It was just too hard," Sharon explained after the trial ended in mid-December. "I just couldn't."
Yet the jurors could -- and did -- look Mosley in the eye as they found him guilty of the first-degree murder of Alan Conner. They also determined that Mosley was guilty on two counts of attempted murder for wounding two of Alan's buddies, Dom Chapa and Cal Lennon.
Mosley, who did not take the stand during the trial, will receive a mandatory prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Although he could have been sentenced immediately after the trial, Sharon Conner and the rest of Alan's family asked the court to impose a formal hearing date so they could put together victim-impact statements, including a five-minute videotape chronicling Alan's life.
"I want him to see who it was that he took from us," Sharon says of Mosley. "I want him to know that Alan was a human being. He didn't know Alan -- he shot him in the back."
Shortly after 1:15 a.m. on that October morning, Alan had accompanied Chapa and Lennon to the King Soopers at Iliff Avenue and Buckley Road; Lennon had wanted to buy a rose for his girlfriend ("Left for Dead," March 9, 2000). When the three teenagers entered the store, they crossed paths with two boys from a rival high school and exchanged stares.
As Alan and his friends left the store, a car carrying Mosley and four others sped into the lot. The occupants got out and jumped Alan's friends. Alan stood outside the fray, five witnesses later testified, refusing to fight. Mosley pulled out a gun and began chasing him.
Mosley fired two rounds, one of which struck Alan in his lower back. Witnesses told the jury that Alan put his hand on the wound, slowly sat down and pleaded, "No more." When Mosley returned to the melee, he shot Chapa in the face and Lennon in the foot. Then he and the other teens jumped back into their car and took off.
Aurora police studied the crime scene for more than three hours but never saw Alan Conner. Chapa and Lennon pleaded with paramedics to search for their friend, but none of the officers or detectives found him. Finally, the police took down the yellow tape and left the scene.
Sharon Conner was awakened that morning by a phone call from a friend of Alan's, telling her to go to the hospital. On her way, with her daughter Audra in the passenger seat, Conner pulled into the King Soopers lot; she had a feeling her son was hiding there. Instead she found Alan lying on his side, dead, next to a flower box.
After Mosley was arrested, Sharon learned that he'd been involved in another violent crime earlier in the year, one in which he'd used a baseball bat to beat another teenager. Claiming there was too little evidence to arrest Mosley in that incident -- despite several eyewitness statements that fingered him -- Aurora police officers sat on the case. After Mosley's arrest for the murder of Alan Conner, however, the cops resumed their investigation and eventually charged him with assault. In June, a jury cleared Mosley of the charge, deciding that he'd acted in self-defense.
During Mosley's murder trial, his lawyers again suggested that he'd been acting in self-defense when he shot Alan Conner. Jurors didn't buy that argument, and they found Mosley guilty. He'll be sentenced on January 5.
"This brings some closure," Sharon Conner says. "But I don't think there ever will be full closure for me. I mean, he was my son. A piece of my heart is gone."
