Slain Carrier’s Name to Live On : Ida Jean Haxton Postal Station to Be Dedicated

The Jan. 3, 1984, murder ranks as one of Orange County’s more heinous crimes.

Letter carrier Ida Jean Haxton, a 30-year-old mother of two, was nearing the end of her postal route in southeast Huntington Beach when she was ambushed by a lone man. He beat her with a baseball bat, stabbed her 19 times with a hunting knife and left her body in a church parking lot more than a mile away.

Although her assailant was later convicted and is serving 26 years to life in state prison, the crime haunted Haxton’s co-workers in the Huntington Station Post Office to the point that they decided five years ago the facility should be renamed in her honor.

Advised that, by regulation, post offices could be named only for people dead 10 years or more, the letter carriers persisted, writing congressmen and sending petitions through the postal bureaucracy.

This year, their efforts paid off.

U.S. Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank decided to make an exception and, in a ceremony scheduled for mid-morning Thursday, will preside as the Huntington Station Post Office, where she once worked, is renamed the Ida Jean Haxton Station.

As many as 300 local postal workers and dignitaries, as well as her family members, are expected for the 10 a.m. event at 9151 Atlanta Ave.

It will mark only the second time in the nation that a post office has been renamed to honor a letter carrier.

“This letter is to express thanks for the dedication of this station to my beloved daughter,” her mother, Lavinia Dominas of Anaheim, recently wrote postal officials in Huntington Beach. “My daughter loved her job and was especially fond of her co-workers.”

Her husband, Ted Haxton Jr., 42, of Garden Grove, has mixed feelings.

“I still have trouble making anything positive out of this (but) this is a step in the right direction,” Haxton said. “I try to urge people to grasp something positive rather than dwell on all the hatred.”

The idea to rename the post office--out of which she delivered mail for several months before her murder--came from

letter carrier John Schmidt, who dropped the proposal in a suggestion box at the station, according to Bernard Coleman, a postal union facilitator who was a member of that post office’s employee morale team at the time.

The employee involvement team, which consisted of about 10 letter carriers, endorsed Schmidt’s idea and sent it up the postal chain of command, Coleman said.

“Most of the people in the office really liked her and they felt that it was the nicest thing they could do for her,” Coleman explained.

But the request died somewhere in the bureaucracy because of the regulation prohibiting the naming of a post office for a person until 10 years after the person’s death, he said. Postal workers were discouraged but did not give up.

“We knew it would be a longtime issue,” Coleman said.

About three years ago, he said, the postal workers discovered that an exception to the renaming rule had been made in Houston, Tex., where a female carrier had been raped and murdered. Coleman said they contacted the office of the late Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Tex.)--who died recently in an Ethiopian plane crash--and were advised how to cut through the red tape.

Wrote to Congressmen

Accordingly, Coleman said, they began writing their congressmen and collecting signatures from hundreds of postal workers and residents along Mrs. Haxton’s route for a petition that was sent back up the postal chain of command, along with a fresh request.

As part of Thursday’s ceremony, attendees will be given an Ida Jean Haxton memorial cancellation stamp. The occasion is so rare that stamp collectors from all over the country have inundated the Huntington Beach post office in recent days with requests to have their letters marked with the memorial cancellation stamp, which will be used only on that day, Vic Freilich, manager of the post office station, said.

As of Tuesday, local postal officials said they had received about 130 such requests, which they intend to honor.

A friendly and outgoing woman, Ida Jean Haxton and her husband had everything going for them when tragedy struck, friends and relatives said.

The couple, married for 10 years, both had solid, well-paying jobs as letter carriers. They had bought a house in Garden Grove and were raising two children--a son, Marcus, by their marriage, and a boy, Jessie, by her husband’s earlier marriage, said Jackie Haxton, Ida Jean’s mother-in-law. The boys were 8 and 14, respectively, at the time of the murder.

“She liked that job because it was outdoors and she got to walk,” said her father-in-law, Ted Haxton.

Victim Enjoyed Her Route

She also enjoyed her route, which took her past 600 homes in the middle-class neighborhoods of southeast Huntington Beach--just blocks from the beach. Her father-in-law recalled that she had said the Christmas Day before her death how relieved she was to have been transferred to Huntington Beach after working in a relatively rough neighborhood in Stanton.

She had been a letter carrier for 3 1/2 years at the time. The new route, he said, put her in proximity to some family living in the area, and provided her an opportunity to relax at the beach.

Nearing the end of her route on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 1984, she was attacked on Jon Jay Drive by a resident of the neighborhood, Gabriel Deluca, then 18, court records show.

According to evidence given an Orange County Superior Court jury, which later convicted him of first-degree murder, Deluca stabbed her 19 times in the chest, face and back. She died from a blow to the back of the head that Deluca inflicted with a baseball bat, the jury found.

Deluca stuffed her body in the back seat of her leased postal car and left it parked in a Costa Mesa church parking lot. After the body was found a short time later that day, bloodhounds flown in from Texas traced her path to the curb in front of Deluca’s house, and her blood was found on the porch, in the entryway and on several steps leading to an upstairs bedroom.

Deluca was arrested the day after the murder and was convicted of first-degree murder in June, 1984, despite his plea of insanity. But Superior Court Judge Leonard H. McBride set aside the conviction on technical grounds and a new trial was ordered. A state appeals court, however, upheld the jury’s conviction and Deluca was sentenced to between 26 years and life imprisonment.

Neither her family nor her co-workers at the Huntington Station Post Office say they have fully recovered from what happened. The renaming of the office after her has, however, satisfied them that they have done all they could to remember her.

“It will sort of like say to the people in the office that your triumphs are rewarded for what you tried to do for her,” Coleman said. “And, I guess, now everyone can lay it (the murder) to rest.”