Judge delays killer’s sentencing
Tulsa World michael.overall@tulsaworld. com
TULSA — In solitary confinement at the Tulsa County jail for most of the last three years, 19-yearold Michael Bever spends most of his time pacing back and forth in a cell that’s roughly the size of a Volkwagen Beetle.
“Every minute and every second,” Bever told a Tulsa County district judge Tuesday morning, “I’ve been thinking about what I could have done different and what kind of life I could have had with my family.”
Expected to hand down a formal sentence in Bever’s quintuple murder case, Judge Sharon Holmes instead decided to give herself more time to think about it, putting off a decision until Aug. 9.
In one sense, her options are limited. After finding Bever guilty of helping his older brother massacre both their parents and three younger siblings, jurors recommended five life sentences with the possibility of parole, plus 28 years for the attempted murder of a sixth family member.
Holmes has little choice but to follow the jury’s sentencing guidelines, but she can decide to make the sentences run concurrently or consecutively. And for Bever, that’s all the difference in the world.
If the sentences run concurrently and he gets credit for time already served, he could become eligible for parole as soon as 2053, when he’ll be 54 years old.
If the sentences run consecutively, he will almost certainly die in prison.
Holmes described it Tuesday as “an extraordinarily complicated and difficult” case that will likely be appealed no matter what decision she makes. And it only got more complicated during Tuesday’s hour-long sentencing hearing.
Half of the 12 jurors took the extraordinary step of sending a signed letter to the judge asking her to respect their verdict, handed down in May at the end of a monthlong trial, giving Bever the chance to eventually go free.
Five jurors even showed up for Tuesday’s hearing and sat on the front row in an apparent show of support for Bever. A defense attorney ushered them in and out of the courtroom and helped them avoid the media.
And Bever himself, apparently making a lastminute decision while sitting at the defense table, asked his attorney to let him speak directly to the judge.
Wearing orange-andwhite stripes with both hands chained to his waist, Bever was visibly shaking as he stood in front of the judge’s bench, where he became wobbly half-way through his statement and asked to sit down. The judge handed him tissues to wipe his tears.
“I want to have a normal life someday,” he told the judge.
“I don’t understand what happened. I wake up in the middle of the night and look over thinking that I’m going to go ask one of my little brothers a question. Even three years later, I can’t believe that it actually happened.”
Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler pointed out that Bever didn’t actually say he was sorry.
During the trial, Bever’s defense team tried to blame his older brother Robert for most, if not all, of the violence. Robert pleaded guilty and is now serving life in prison with no chance of parole.
Defense attorneys portrayed Michael Bever, at worst, as a reluctant accomplice who got caught got up in his brother’s sick fantasies and didn’t know how to stop the murderous plot.
Kunzweiler, however, saw it the other way around.
“Michael was the leader,” he told the judge Tuesday.
Michael spent months helping his brother plan the murders, Kunzweiler said. And when that plan didn’t go as expected, Michael was the one who improvised and told his brother how to “finish the mission,” he said.
Michael started the attack on the night of July 22, 2015, when he lured his then-13-year-old sister into his bedroom in Broken Arrow, where Robert came up behind the girl and slit her throat, Kunzweiler said.
That sister, identified in court only by the initials C.B., survived and became the prosecution’s star witness.
Now 16, she’s terrified that her brother might someday get out of prison and come after her again, according to a letter written by her adoptive mother and read aloud in court Tuesday.
“It will take C.B. a long time, countless hours of therapy and deep soul searching to overcome what happened to her,” the letter said.
The mother, who was not named in court, also adopted the youngest Bever sibling, a now-5year-old girl who was asleep in a crib during the murders and suffered no physical injuries. The girl is nonetheless emotionally scarred and “constantly afraid of being separated from me,” the adoptive mother wrote.
If Bever ever gets out of prison, both girls will spend the rest of their lives “looking over their shoulders,” the mother wrote.
U.S. Supreme Court precedents generally discourage life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. But prosecutors argued that this case is so horrific, the court should make an exception.
After killing their family members, the Bever brothers wanted to go on a cross-country killing spree to become the most notorious mass murderers in history, Kunzweiler said. Nobody knows how many more people would have died if Broken Arrow police hadn’t found the brothers hiding in the woods behind their house on the night of the killings, he said.
“I can’t imagine who would ever want to live next door to him,” Kunzweiler said.
Bever sought a plea deal that would have avoided a trial in exchange for a life-with-parole sentence, but Kunzweiler rejected the offer, said Tulsa County Chief Public Defender Corbin Brewster.
Jurors, after hearing all the evidence, decided that Michael Bever was not beyond rehabilitation and wanted to give him “a chance to prove himself” in the future, Brewster said.
“Several jurors submitted a letter,” Brewster said. “Several jurors are here today. I can’t imagine the disrespect it would show to them if this court did something else.”
Anticipating a lengthy appeals process regardless of what decision she makes, Judge Holmes promised to deliver the sentence in writing so higher courts “will know exactly what I was thinking.”
“I want to take the time to get this right,” she said. “And I will get it as right as I can.”