There were no angry words for the man who kicked the Hollywood jazz pianist to death in a brutal act of road rage and no emotion beyond a few choked words and a hand smearing away a tear.
“I don't feel compelled to say things that make you suffer more," Osnes' sister Mary Beth Anderson wrote in a letter read in court. “I expect you play that evening over and over in your head, like I do. What if?"
At the defense table, David Jassy, a 35-year-old Swedish national, stared over his shoulder with wet eyes at a courtroom gallery where two dozen of Osnes' friends sat silently awaiting the mandatory imposition of a sentence of 15 years to life in prison.
Some had attended the January trial in which half a dozen witnesses described a sudden, shocking confrontation between strangers in November 2008.
Jassy, a hip-hop artist from Stockholm on a working vacation in Los Angeles, became enraged when Osnes, a pedestrian, slapped his rented sport utility vehicle after it edged into a crosswalk, according to testimony.
Jassy punched and kicked Osnes, 55, in the head and then drove over his body as bystanders screamed for him to stop, witnesses said.
Letters read aloud from Osnes' sisters, who were too ill to attend the hearing, and a brief address by a longtime friend referred to their ongoing frustration to find meaning in the senselessness of the crime.
“There are no winners here," James Crowley, a longtime friend of the victim, told the court.
Osnes' loved ones had lost his steadfast friendship, the music community had lost a pianist who knew 400 jazz standards by heart, and, Crowley said, turning to Jassy, “You lost most of your life. You lost your son for all practical purposes. You lost the girl you loved."
The judge cited the viciousness of the assault, in particular a fatal kick to Osnes' face that fractured his skull in several places and rendered him unconscious. He plummeted to the ground “like a felled tree."
