Youth Gets 13 Years in Fatal Teen Club Shooting

Christopher D. Comete, a 16-year-old convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the shooting death of another youth at a Van Nuys teen-age nightclub, was sentenced Friday to the California Youth Authority.

Juvenile Court Judge Burton S. Katz sentenced Comete to 13 years, the maximum term for voluntary manslaughter with use of a gun.

The youth authority is required to release Comete by the time he turns 25, and in order to keep him in custody beyond age 23, there must be a jury trial.

Comete, wearing county-issued blue jeans and a gray sweat shirt, did not look at Katz as his sentence was read. The Canoga Park youth instead concentrated on writing a statement to the judge. The boy’s father, who listened to the proceedings with the aid of a Vietnamese interpreter, sat beside him.

“I feel very bad that it has happened,” said the statement, read by defense attorney Dennis Mulcahy. “If I had a wish and it could come true, I wish that Mark Miller could be alive and me die, because it’s better dying for a good cause than a bad one. Amen.” Mulcahy said Comete was too shaken to read the statement.

Comete was convicted of shooting Miller, who would have turned 16 Thursday, during a confrontation in a parking lot behind the Hot Trax club about 2 a.m. on Aug. 17. That fight followed a dance-floor brawl two days before, which was triggered by a comment Comete made about the punk-style hairdo of Miller’s girlfriend.

The victim’s mother, Karen Miller, wept frequently during the three-hour sentencing hearing and left the courtroom during the reading of Comete’s statement.

Mike Miller, the dead boy’s father, sat quietly in a corner with his arm around his other son, Larry, 17.

Katz rejected Mulcahy’s request that Comete be sentenced to a county psychological treatment facility for the first year of his confinement.

The judge, reading from a psychological report that said Comete may have been trying to prove his “manliness” by confronting Miller, asked authority officials to give Comete extensive psychiatric therapy during his confinement.

Friends and relatives of Miller said Friday that they wanted to contradict “character assassination” testimony made during the trial that Miller led violent, unprovoked attacks against other youths in November, 1984, and May, 1985.

“Mark was no saint, but he was one hell of a great kid,” said Karen Miller, who read a prepared statement. “He was never afraid to show his love.”

She filed a civil lawsuit Monday against Hot Trax, Comete and Comete’s parents, charging that the owners and managers of the club contributed to her son’s death because they did not maintain proper security at the club.