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Former Central High School student Terry Mosley was found not guilty of first-degree assault by an Adams County jury last Thursday. The jury deliberated for a little more than two hours before ruling that Mosley had acted in self-defense when he struck Hinkley High School student Levi Cumins with an aluminum baseball bat during a party on May 15, 1998. The two students knew each other through recreational baseball leagues.
The jury listened to two days’ worth of testimony, including the details of the incident. Aurora police detective Barry Maul wrote in reports that Cumins and other students attacked the car Mosley was riding in and that once Mosley got out of the car, a large melee ensued, and Mosley struck Cumins with the bat. As a result, doctors spent several hours reconstructing Cumins’s face. Eye specialists told him he’d lost the center vision in his right eye and that the nerve damage was so severe that feeling would never return to that side of his face.
After interviewing 26 witnesses, Aurora police filed charges against Mosley on January 22, 1999 — more than eight months after the incident. Cumins’s parents had criticized the Aurora Police Department and Detective Maul for not moving swiftly in the investigation — and then arresting Mosley only after he had been arrested for murder in an unrelated case (“Left for Dead,” March 9).
The Adams County justice system didn’t inspire any more confidence, when, on March 8, jailers brought the wrong Terry Mosley into the courtroom. During the morning transfer from the Arapahoe County Jail, they had summoned an inmate with the same name. Upon learning that the wrong Terry Mosley was in the courtroom, Judge Harlan Bockman angrily ordered that the inmate be returned to his cell and that the correct Terry Mosley be brought to court. “I don’t know why the confusion occurred, but the mistake was recognized before there was any jury selection,” says Steve Bernard, spokesman for the Adams County district attorney. “That person was returned, and the proper person faced the charges.”
Of the verdict, Levi Cumins’s stepfather, Paul Sandoval, said the family had few comments. “We’re pretty upset right now. It didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.”
Public defender Jeff Maningo, who represented Mosley, said he couldn’t comment on the case, since Mosley has another case pending: a first-degree-murder charge in the death of Alan Conner, which is scheduled to go to trial on May 8.
