Susan Dianne Eubanks

Victims
4
Years active
October 27, 1996
Location
San Marcos, San Diego County, California, USA
Method
Shooting (.38-caliber revolver)
Status
Convicted of four counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death on October 13, 1999. Remains under sentence of death in California, where executions have been under moratorium since 2019 and the San Quentin condemned unit was closed in 2024.

Eubanks was born in 1964 and lived at San Marcos in San Diego County. On October 26 and 27, 1996 she had a series of confrontations: her boyfriend left, the police were called over a domestic dispute, and she had been drinking heavily.

She then shot her four sons with a .38 revolver: Brandon, fourteen; Austin, seven; Brigham, six; and Matthew, four. She shot herself in the abdomen and survived. She left a note blaming the boys' fathers and her boyfriend, and the prosecution's case was that she had killed the children to punish the men.

She was convicted of four counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death on October 13, 1999. She remains on California's death row.

This is a single act, not a serial case. It is also one of a small number of American cases in which a mother was sentenced to death for killing her own children, and the entry records that the state's case and hers agreed on the sequence of events and differed only on her state of mind.