Family in Daze as one Brother Kills Another : Stabbing: Basketball game quarrel turned deadly, as 18-year-old plunged knife into brother, 20. They loved each other deeply, family says.

Orlando Buchanan first pleaded with the judge Thursday to release his son, Steve, from custody. Then he drove to an Oceanside mortuary to mourn another son who died at Steve’s hands.

The 41-year-old financial consultant has found himself hard put to reconcile his tranquil life--a family that included three loving sons in a tidy blue Oceanside house with white trim--with his activities during the past week coordinating funeral services for 20-year-old Orlando Raul Buchanan Jr. and the defense of his 18-year-old son Steve, who is charged with his brother’s murder.

Steve and Orlando Jr. got into an argument Saturday night while playing basketball in the back yard of their Oceanside home, authorities and family members said. The argument continued into the kitchen, where the youngest son, John Paul, 16, was fixing dinner.

Steve is accused of picking up a 7-inch kitchen knife and stabbing Orlando Jr. in the chest once, severing his aorta. Orlando Jr. died on the kitchen floor 30 minutes later, despite the efforts of neighbors and paramedics.

Their parents were out of the house at the time.

The Buchanans, however, said the incident could only have been an accident, and that the brothers, who have roomed together since they were young, loved each other deeply.

“We know that it was an accident,” said Orlando Buchanan Sr., a Panamanian immigrant whose three sons are from his first marriage. “We grieve both for the tragedy of Orlando and the tragedy that Steve is in right now.”

The family’s attorney, Terry Allen, described the stabbing as an accident after the two brothers’ tussle “escalated from kidding around to where it was a matter of pride that the older brother couldn’t let the younger one show him up.”

At one point during the argument, the younger brother, Steve, picked up the knife and “spun around with the knife when Orlando grabbed at him, crashing into the knife,” Allen said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. James Valliant sympathized with the family’s grief, but said that doesn’t change the facts.

“The defendant picked up a 7-inch blade during the course of what he knew was a physical fight, and that blade landed 6 inches into his brother’s chest, and that is murder,” Valliant said.

Valliant said the depth of the cut is “unlikely to be an accident . . . and requires pushing and pushing.”

“He may have instantly regretted what he did, and he may have otherwise had a very loving relationship with his brother, but murder is murder,” Valliant said.

The death stunned the Buchanans’ middle-class northeast Oceanside neighborhood, where some neighbors wash their cars in driveways while others tend well-kept lawns and gardens on quiet afternoons.

When the police and ambulance sirens broke the community’s peace last Saturday, most neighbors on Powell Road thought there had been a car accident on a busy nearby street.

“To hear that something like this, you’d think that would only happen in some gang-related area, but not here,” said Carol Smith, who lives four houses down from the Buchanans and has lived in the development since it opened five years ago.

Smith and other neighbors said the Buchanan boys were generally very quiet and polite and never caused the neighborhood any trouble.

“They were always very nice and would come by and say ‘Good afternoon’ or ‘Good morning,’ ” said Smith as she dug water trenches around her front-lawn plants.

Friends describe the three brothers as being friendly and close-knit.

“If one had a problem, all three of them had that problem, you couldn’t upset one of them without upsetting all of them,” said Terre Hoskins, who has known the family for several years.

Relatives of the Buchanans have flown out from across the country and Central America to lend support.

“It’s the kind of situation you see on television, and you shake your head and say, ‘What’s happening to this world?’ ” said Ron Buchanan, one of Orlando Sr.’s six siblings.

“But, when it happens to you, you just can’t believe it,” said Ron Buchanan, who flew to San Diego from Miami.

The family has made arrangements for a Saturday funeral, but attorney Allen said he might ask them to change the date until after Steve’s possible release on Monday.

If Steve were to attend the funeral while in custody, he would have to be escorted by a law enforcement agent, and it is likely that he would be dressed in prison clothes and have to wear chains and leg irons, Allen said.

“The judge is willing to sign an order to release Steve for a funeral on Saturday, but I’m not sure what kind of emotional effect it would have on both the family and Steve if he were to appear in that fashion,” Allen said.

But the youth’s uncle feels is it important for Steve to attend.

“He is going to set peace with his brother when he sees him,” Ron Buchanan said. “They slept in the same room, played ball together, they always have been together, and they always will be.”

Thursday’s bail review hearing was a disappointment to the Buchanans, who were hoping to have Steve released into the custody of a family friend.

But Vista Municipal Judge Suzanne Knauf, saying she feared for Steve Buchanan’s mental and emotional well-being, refused to lower his bail, which is set at $100,000.

“I am concerned that this may not be an isolated event, and I am concerned about his penchant for violence,” Knauf said.

The 18-year-old student at El Camino High School will have another bail review Monday, after the results of a psychological evaluation are returned.

Steve’s school counselor, Lillian Adams, testified that he was looking forward to graduating in June and was “an excellent basketball player,” having played on the school’s team for several years.

“He was an above-average student and always very polite,” Adams said outside the courtroom. Steve had been working one hour a day as an aide in the counseling office and had planned to attend MiraCosta College after graduation, she said--the school his big brother already attended.

Orlando Buchanan Sr. stood grimly in the back of the courtroom as Knauf handed down her decision.

Twenty years ago, he recalled, he wore his best suit when he went to bring his first son, Orlando Jr., home from the hospital in Panama.

“My wife had to stay in the hospital because it was a difficult labor, and he was allowed to leave before she did,” Buchanan said.

“I had put on my best suit that day, and I remember being so proud when I took him home,” reminisced Buchanan, smiling broadly.

“Orlando and Steve, those guys, from the day they were born, they were together.”

Buchanan divorced his first wife in 1976 and moved to the United States, later bringing his three sons to live with him, first in New York and then the San Diego area in 1988. He and his second wife, Mireya, have a 7-year-old daughter.

He was on a lunch break at work at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside last Saturday when the call came that his son had been killed.

“I had gone across the street to get an Easter basket for my little girl, Sue-Lee,” he said. “I came back into the hospital all proud of the basket and thinking that I could put it in her bedroom so she could see it when she wakes up.”

Hospital officials led him to the medical center’s chapel, where Buchanan, who is fluent in Spanish, thought they were going to ask him to translate for someone else. But then a doctor told him that his son had been assaulted and killed.

His first thought was that it couldn’t have happened in his orderly house, in his secure neighborhood, he said. But then he arrived at his home to see scores of police cars and ambulance vehicles.

“They wouldn’t let me in to see him before they took the body away,” Buchanan said, fidgeting with his eyeglasses and a tissue. “I wanted to go into the house and hug my son, and talk to him and make my peace with him.”

On Thursday, at the viewing of Orlando Jr.’s body at the Eternal Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary, the senior Buchanan stroked his son’s head and combed his hair.