Brandon Armstrong was fourteen. Before he was killed he telephoned the mother of his best friend and asked for help. She told him to reassess the situation and call back if he needed to.
Susan Dianne Eubanks was born in 1964, was thirty-three that autumn, and lived at San Marcos in San Diego County. She had become dependent on prescription drugs after a workplace injury, had lost her job, and was in divorce proceedings. On October 26, 1997 she argued with her live-in boyfriend, who left, and the police were called to the house over a domestic dispute. She had been drinking and taking tranquilizers.
She shot Brandon in the temple with a .38 revolver and then fired a second shot into his neck from a few inches away. She shot her three younger sons in their bedroom: Austin, seven; Brigham, six; and Matthew, four. She then shot herself in the stomach and survived.
She left notes. To Brandon's father she wrote that he would hate her forever but that she could not let Brandon live without his brothers, and that she had been strong for twenty-five years and was tired of the fight and the hurt. To her sister and her niece she wrote that she had no desire to go on. To the father of two of the boys, according to the court record, she wrote: "I've lost everyone I've ever loved." She asked to be buried in the same casket as Matthew.
Her defense was that she had blacked out. The prosecution argued that she could not have: the revolver held fewer rounds than she fired, so she had reloaded twice, which gave her time to understand what she was doing and stop. Prosecutors also pointed out that she had shot her sons in the head and herself in the stomach.
The jury took two hours to convict her on all four counts and two days to return a verdict of death. Judge Joan Weber refused a defense motion to modify it and imposed the death sentence in October 1999. Eubanks was sent to the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla, where California holds its condemned women.
The automatic appeal was decided on December 19, 2011. Justice Ming Chin wrote for a unanimous court: there had been minor harmless errors at trial, the argument that they were cumulatively unfair failed, and the challenges to the sentence failed. The judgment was affirmed. Her lawyers had argued, among other things, that jurors had been improperly required to be proficient in English, that police had searched the San Marcos house illegally, and that the prosecution expert's conclusions had been presented to the jury as scientific fact.
In January 2020 her lawyers filed a petition arguing that her trial attorneys had been ineffective. Judge Weber, the judge who had presided over the trial twenty years earlier, scheduled an evidentiary hearing on it, and if the claim were sustained the result would have been a new trial. Eubanks also had a petition in federal court and an appeal before the Fourth District.
The San Diego County district attorney's office moved first. On October 4, 2024 it asked the court to resentence her, and Judge Weber replaced the death sentence with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The district attorney said the moratorium on executions and the prospect of putting the victims' family through a lengthy new trial had both weighed in the decision, and District Attorney Summer Stephan described it as an agreement "guaranteed to keep this murderer behind bars for the rest of her life." It also ended the federal petition and the appeal. She was sixty.
The sentence was not commuted by a governor or overturned by a court. The prosecution gave it up, in exchange for finality, twenty-five years after the jury voted for it.
There was never a dispute about what happened in the house on October 26, 1997. The state and the defense disagreed only about her state of mind, and the jury settled that in two hours.