Mom raising funds to attend Colorado trial for son’s suspected killer

AURORA, Colo. (KDVR) — The mother of a homicide victim will soon have to relive the gruesome discovery of her son’s body encased in cement in an Aurora condo crawl space.

Trial is set to begin for one of the two people accused of killing 36-year-old Karl “KJ” Beaman Jr. some 10 months after he was reported missing.

“It was hard, and it’s been hard since I found out,” his mother, Kyla Dubberstein, said. “He’s  the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to bed.”

After searching for her son for almost a year, Dubberstein still remembers learning the devastating news.

“All kinds of stuff went through my mind about why he wasn’t contacting me and what happened,” Dubberstein said.

She said her son moved to Colorado to help his best friend, Haskell Leroy Crawford. In June 2022, she got worried after not hearing from her son for weeks.

“I don’t know. I kept thinking, well, maybe he lost his cell phone,” she said.

Tipster contacts mother on Facebook

Eventually, she started a Facebook page to search for Karl. On April 1, the page got a message from someone claiming to know where he was.

“I was contacted by someone who knew my son’s killer, and his girlfriend had confessed to her about it,” Dubberstein said. “Of course, on April Fools’ Day, I immediately thought that it was a cruel April Fools’ joke. She did get back to me later and gave me all of the information that was told to her, and I contacted the Aurora Police Department.”

The arrest affidavit shows officers spoke to Crawford’s girlfriend, Casie Bock, who said Crawford killed Beamean in her Aurora condo and forced her to move the body to a crawl space, where Crawford allegedly covered his body with concrete. She told police he did this because he believed Beamean was a police informant after the two were caught trying to steal catalytic converters.

“I just want to know why and how he can do that to my son when they considered each other brothers,” Dubberstein said. “How can he do that to his brother?”

Crawford and Bock are now both in custody awaiting trial.

“I’m hoping he will be convicted of first-degree murder and be sentenced to life in prison,” Dubberstein said.

Her focus now is to use funds from a GoFundMe to make the trip from Arizona to Colorado to attend the trial and get closure and justice for her son.

“A lot of people asked me, why do I want to be there at the trial?” Dubberstein said. “It’s because I want KJ to have a face there. I want people to know he has a family that loves him. He’s a good person, and he was just going through a hard time.”

Dubberstein said the trial is scheduled for the first two weeks of September in Arapahoe County.

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