Grieving Family Awaits Prosecution : Courts: They refused to endorse plea bargain after fatal stabbing. Now Artie R. Brambila’s father and sister are determined to see the murder case through the legal system.

The knife that killed 20-year-old Artie R. Brambila outside a Pasadena-area hotel also inflicted deep emotional wounds upon his family.

More than a year has passed since the young man’s death, but his father, Art P. Brambila, 50, and sister, Roxane Cornell, 28, say their grief has not abated.

The man arrested in the murder is scheduled to stand trial Monday in Pasadena, and the family members have vowed to be in court every day until a verdict is returned.

“We don’t want to subject ourselves to it, but we have to,” said Art Brambila, an entertainment marketing consultant who lives in Alhambra.

Cornell, a nutritionist who lives in Fontana, said well-meaning friends have urged her to put her brother’s death behind her. But she is adamant about seeing the violent case work its way through the justice system.

“I have gone on with my life,” she said. “But the pain is there. I still think about him every day. And I cry at least once a day. It’s not as though we don’t want to go on with our lives. But it hurts.”

The family members insist that the slaying was a case of cold-blooded murder. And they have refused to endorse a proposed plea bargain that might have eliminated the need for a trial for Ruben Lugo, 25, who is charged with murder, attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators say Artie Brambila, who worked for a Pasadena printing firm, was driving along Colorado Boulevard with a friend the night of Sept. 21, 1990, when two young women hailed them. The women urged the two men to park across from a motel and then offered to engage in sex with them for money, authorities said.

When the young men handed over $50, however, the women ran to the motel, investigators said. When Brambila and his friend pursued them to retrieve the money, investigators said, the women’s friend, Lugo, fatally stabbed Brambila and wounded his companion.

At an earlier court hearing, Lugo’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender R. Bruce Schweiger, argued for a dismissal of the murder charge.

“I suggested that if any homicide was established, it was voluntary, or involuntary manslaughter,” he said in a recent interview.

Schweiger declined to discuss his trial strategy. But the prosecution anticipates that the defense will be based on Lugo having acted in self-defense or to protect the women.

Art Brambila disagrees. He believes his son, who had moved into his first apartment only a few months before his death, was unfamiliar with the dangers of the street.

“Being foolish and naive, they ran after the girls. That was their big mistake,” Brambila said. He believes the young men were victims of a robbery scheme.

Family members said Artie Brambila was a well-liked young man who had never gotten into trouble with the law.

At least 500 people, including many former classmates from Alhambra High School, attended his funeral.

“He didn’t have an enemy in the world,” Art Brambila said. “There was no one who didn’t like Artie. He was known for his smile.”

The father had developed unusually close ties with his children after he and their mother divorced and he took over primary responsibility for raising them.

“I was a single parent,” Brambila said. “I sacrificed my career because I knew how much they needed me. And I guess I needed them.

“They turned out to be very good children,” he said. “I’m proud to say that neither of them was ever involved in drugs. Neither of them was involved with gangs.”

Cornell said her brother was also one of her best friends. It would have been out of character for him to get involved in a street skirmish, she said.

“I think the wildest thing Artie ever did was pierce his ear,” she said.

Since the slaying, Art Brambila and Cornell have struggled to come to terms with their loss. Both have attended meetings of Parents of Murdered Children, a support group that also assists siblings.

Brambila continues to attend weekly private counseling sessions. He drew on his loss when an East Los Angeles singer asked him to write Spanish lyrics for a new recording of the Gene Pitney hit, “Town Without Pity.”

The father also wrote a eulogy for a service held on the first anniversary of his son’s death. And he has revived warm memories by watching home videos that include footage of his son.

But Brambila acknowledged that his lingering grief also contributed to his separation from his second wife and his departure from a job at a radio station.

Last year, Cornell expressed her grief by speaking about her brother’s death at a detention center for violent young offenders.

“There were a lot of hard faces there,” she said. “Maybe two out of the 60 listened to me. I cried and I yelled and I screamed about what possessed them to do this (criminal behavior).”

For the last two years, the father and daughter have declined to attend a large annual Christmas party organized by relatives.

“It hurts to be among that type of happiness, when something has been ripped out of your heart,” Brambila said. “People can’t understand this. It’s a very unique pain.”

Rosemead therapist Peter Radestock, who is treating Brambila, said the father’s lingering grief is not unusual.

The loss of a child, he said, can be “like a double death,” because the dreams and goals a parent has attached to the child are also destroyed.

“In a homicide,” the therapist added, “the child is taken away from the parent without the parent having any control whatsoever. So, one of the things that comes up is a very deep sense of powerlessness and rage.

“When you put that rage together with the sense of losing a part of your life, then you have all the prerequisites for depression.”

Radestock, a former attorney, said that attending a trial can help surviving family members resolve their grief.

“One of the things that needs to happen is a sense of completion,” he said.

But the therapist also cautioned:

“Some people never recover from a trauma such as this, no matter what the outcome of the case is.”