Neighbors Rally to Woman’s Defense in Vista Murder Trial

Over the years, Evanna Marie Cavanaugh has woven together an enviable life of suburban success.

She is vigorously involved in the lives of her four bright and healthy children, volunteering in their schools and assisting them with 4-H Club projects. Deeply religious, she has taught Sunday school and is active in church retreats.

Cavanaugh, 47, is propelled by a strong sense of civic responsibility as well. She organized neighborhood crime watch programs during a two-year tenure on the Vista Crime Prevention Commission and has been on the front line in numerous campaigns aimed at slowing the city’s growth rate. She chimes in on many a debate at City Hall and frequently pens letters on community issues to local newspapers.

But recently her carefully crafted world began to unravel. On Tuesday, Cavanaugh will be in court facing charges that she murdered her brother. If convicted, she could spend the rest of her life in prison.

Sheriff’s homicide detectives say that on the morning of Nov. 19, Cavanaugh shot Charles Phegley, 44, five times in the neck and head at their mother’s home in Leucadia. Cavanaugh’s attorney, Charles Goldberg, argues that Phegley was mentally disturbed and had a history of violent behavior toward family members. His client may have fired the shots, he says, but it was an act of self-defense.

Prosecutors, however, say she is a murderer. They base their case in part on a police tape-recording that apparently shows Cavanaugh called authorities about the shooting but interrupted her report to fire the final, fatal bullet at her moving brother.

News of Cavanaugh’s case has triggered an avalanche of support and sympathy in Vista, where the slight, vivacious woman whom friends call “Van” is well-known, well-liked and highly regarded.

More than 40 people--including two City Council members, the Vista postmaster, a trustee on the school board and several area ministers--packed the courtroom at her bail hearing in November. Two individuals even offered the judge the deeds to their homes as security for her release.

The Community Church of Vista has started a fund to help the family with legal costs, and in every corner of the city those who know Cavanaugh insist that only extreme provocation could have prompted her to fire a gun.

“Above all, Van is an extremely conscientious person who knows the difference between right and wrong,” said Councilman Lloyd von Haden, who has known Cavanaugh for 10 years and has enlisted her help on several growth-related issues. “She is not a murderer. I have no doubt that she got that gun for protection because she felt threatened by her brother.”

According to sheriff’s homicide detectives, the Nov. 19 shooting occurred at 10 a.m. at the Leucadia home of Cavanaugh’s mother, Marie Phegley.

Sheriff’s deputies said Cavanaugh told them she brought the gun to the house on Andrews Street so her elderly mother would have protection against Charles, who was living in a guest house at the rear of the property.

The detectives said that Mrs. Phegley, who was not at home when the shooting occurred, told them that Charles had taken her gun, which was hidden under her mattress, and refused to return it; she said she asked Cavanaugh to loan her her husband’s gun for protection.

Goldberg said Cavanaugh’s brother, who was unemployed at the time of his death, had a long history of treatment for mental illness and had initiated violent confrontations with both his sister and their mother on several occasions. He had been to see his psychiatrist the day of the shooting, Goldberg said.

“In the months prior to (Phegley’s) demise, there was a history of increasingly violent behavior on his part, including him striking (Cavanaugh) at least once,” Goldberg said. “My client had reason to be fearful. This is a clear case of self-defense.”

Goldberg will not discuss details of the case, such as what occurred immediately before Phegley’s death. And Susan Biery, the deputy district attorney assigned to the case, would say only that the shooting appears to have followed “a dispute concerning some property the two jointly owned.”

In an interview, Mrs. Phegley confirmed that her son, whom she described as a schizophrenic who could be “very violent but also an angel at times,” and daughter had argued over income from several rental properties they owned in El Cajon. On Nov. 19, Cavanaugh asked her brother to share with her rent money he had recently collected, Mrs. Phegley said.

“That irritated him, set him off, and then it happened,” she said, giving her daughter’s account of the shooting. “It could just as easily have happened the other way, with him in control of the gun and my daughter dead.”

But prosecutors point out an irregularity in Cavanaugh’s claim of self-defense. North County’s Supervising Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Walden noted that Cavanaugh apparently fired the fifth and fatal shot at her brother while reporting the episode to a dispatcher over the 911 emergency telephone line.

A tape of the conversation reveals that Cavanaugh interrupted her report to fire the final shot when she noticed her brother moving, prosecutors said. That fact is likely to be key to the prosecution’s case.

Following her arrest, Cavanaugh spent five nights in jail, sleeping on the floor during part of her stay because of overcrowded conditions. When Hugh Brom, pastor at the Community Church of Vista, learned of her arrest, he attempted to see her.

“But they wouldn’t let me in, so I wrote her a letter, assuring her of our love and prayers,” Brom said. “Then she called me from the jail. She said she felt upbeat, safe and strong. She never seemed to get flapped by the thing.”

After Cavanaugh’s release on Nov. 23, church members held a party for her. Then she and her husband, a Vista math teacher, spent some time with their children at a religious retreat. Meanwhile, Cavanaugh’s friends remained dazed with disbelief.

“Total shock, I felt total shock when I heard,” said Marcia Viger, a trustee of the Vista Unified School District and Cavanaugh’s friend for eight years. “I mean, Van is not exactly your stereotypical killer.”

Cavanaugh might be more aptly described as a “stereotypical mom,” Viger said. Aside from her forays into politics as a member of the Crime Prevention Commission and a foot soldier in several initiative drives to limit growth in Vista, Cavanaugh seems content to absorb herself in the travails of home and family.

“When I think of Van, I visualize her in sweats and her Birkenstoks walking up and down the street with the sheep they raise for the 4-H Club,” said Viger, who has relied on Cavanaugh in her campaigns for the school board.

“Or I think of how we both did the YMCA’s Indian Maidens program with our daughters. It’s just impossible to reconcile all that I know and love about her with what’s happened.”

Viger and other friends say that if Cavanaugh’s brother ever caused trouble for her, she never let it show.

“I knew she had a brother, and that he lived nearby, but the subject never came up,” Viger said.

But Councilwoman Gloria McClellan, a friend of the family’s for 10 years, said Cavanaugh’s husband had once confided that Phegley “tended to be difficult, almost unmanageable at times” and that the couple feared “they would one day inherit the responsibility of looking out for him.”

“The feeling I got was that Van was very fearful of him and worried that someday she would have the burden (of caring for him),” McClellan said.

Reached at her home, Cavanaugh declined to comment.