A Colorado man will serve three decades in prison after he murdered a former friend and buried him in the crawl space under a condominium. Haskel Leroy Crawford was sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the 2022 death of Karl Beaman Jr.
Beaman’s mother, Kyla Dubberstein, who lives in Arizona, called the Aurora Police Department in 2023 to report her son as missing, telling police she had not heard from him since May 2022. She said that she believed Crawford may have attacked her son because the two of them were nearly caught stealing catalytic converters. Dubberstein also created a Facebook page to help find Beaman.
A tipster with the user name “Nope TryAgain” contacted her and said Crawford and his girlfriend, Casie Bock, had buried Beaman in a shallow grave under Bock’s condo and covered his remains in concrete. The tipster told Dubberstein that Crawford murdered her son because he believed he was a police informant in a criminal case.
Beaman and Crawford had been long-time friends. Deputy District Attorney Michele Fuller said, “Mr. Beaman died at the hands of someone he considered his best friend and brother of nearly two decades.”
Authorities contacted the tipster, who told them Bock admitted to the crime one night while “very high.”
Police executed a warrant at Bock’s condo building and accessed the crawlspace through her bedroom, where they found Beaman’s decomposed body.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Kristina Hayden said if it weren’t for Beaman’s devotion to finding her son, Crawford’s actions may have never come to light.
Bock pleaded guilty to being an accessory to a crime and helping Crawford move Beaman’s body into the crawlspace. She told detectives that she returned home from work that day to find Beaman lying on the ground with a white plastic Walmart bag over his head and claimed that Crawford forced her to help move the body. She received a deferred judgment in 2023.
Crawford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Beaman’s death and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Judge Baker ordered Crawford’s sentence to be served consecutively to a 16-year sentence for an unrelated aggravated robbery in Jefferson County, a sentence he is currently serving at the Bent County Correctional Facility.
“He murdered my only child,” Dubberstein said at the sentencing hearing. “This plea agreement means my son’s loved ones, our family, and my husband and I are spared from having to listen to the horrific details or seeing graphic images of the brutality that took place. We may never know all the details, but the defendant does. I hope it haunts him every day for the rest of his life like it does me.”
