More Than 700 Gather to Mourn Slain Youth : Funeral: Chad Hubbard, 14, is remembered as a boy with charisma, kindness and a life tragically cut short.

More than 700 mourners crowded a Simi Valley church Saturday to say goodby to Chad Patrick Hubbard, a popular, gregarious 14-year-old stabbed to death by a classmate last week as he waited for the school bus.

“Chad Hubbard was 14 years old, and that is a time for living, not dying,” Bob Eichele, the pastor who once confirmed Chad, said at the boy’s funeral service. “What do you say to all of this, how do you act, when everything is so tragic, so sad and so heart-wrenching?”

Services were held at Simi Covenant Church because Our Saviour Lutheran Church, where the Hubbards worshiped and where Eichele presides, was not large enough to hold the mourners.

And still, at Simi Covenant, mourners packed the outer aisles and spilled out the side and back doors Saturday morning. Friends and classmates said Chad--a baseball pitcher and basketball player at Valley View Junior High School--was the kind of boy whom the other guys liked and admired and the girls wanted to date.

“His smile--he had a great smile,” said a friend of Chad. “No matter where he went, he lit up the room.”

Classmates said most of the students in the ninth grade at Valley View either knew Chad or knew of him, because of his charismatic, generous manner, good looks and unflagging friendliness.

“I knew him by his reputation--how nice he was, and how he made people feel welcome,” said Valley View ninth-grader Kim Carder, 15. “He was really good-looking, but he wasn’t conceited or anything about the way he looked.

“He didn’t deserve this,” she said. “It’s a real waste.”

Friends said Chad had only one enemy--Phillip Hernandez, the 13-year-old accused of stabbing Chad during a scuffle Tuesday afternoon. The two had a running feud that escalated into a fistfight near the school bus stop at the campus, friends said. The fight ended with Chad stabbed in the heart.

Hernandez, who has been charged with murder, is scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 18 in Ventura County Superior Court. He will stay until then at county Juvenile Hall after a judge denied his lawyer’s request Friday to release him to the custody of his mother.

On Saturday, Chad’s friends and relatives wondered how they would pick up the pieces of their lives and go forward.

“I’m just devastated,” said George Miller, Chad’s great-uncle and a deacon at a Roman Catholic diocese in San Diego, who read Bible verses in a breaking voice at the service. “This is a tremendous loss to our family, and I still can’t believe it.”

Friends and other relatives surrounded Chad’s mother, Jackie; father, Scott; brothers Ryan, 10, and Robbie, 5, and sister Danielle, 7, at the conclusion of the funeral service, standing for about 30 minutes in a quiet cluster of weeping and hugging.

“He taught me about baseball, how to do the right swing and everything,” Ryan said of his older brother. “I admired how he never gave up on anything.”

Ryan said his parents have invited Chad’s friends to write messages for their son on the walls of his room, leaving the once-plain surfaces covered in pen-written notes. “I wrote him that ‘Legends never die,’ ” Ryan said.

Later, at the graveside service at Assumption Cemetery, Jackie Hubbard, a lab assistant at Amgen in Newbury Park, kissed the casket as she approached it to lay a rose on it. “My baby,” she sobbed, throwing her arms over the casket’s top. “I love you.”

During the service, members of the school’s basketball team presented the family with Chad’s team jersey, mounted and framed, which Chad’s father, a drywall finisher, held and looked at on and off throughout the service.

Afterward, Ryan stood with other mourners by the casket for more than an hour, laying his head on its baby blue surface and talking to the brother he had lost. Relatives said he was asking Chad to forgive him for some of the names he had called him over the years.

Parents of other Valley View students said news of the slaying shook them to the core.

“I’m just horrified,” said Kathee Davis, whose son, Cody, plays second base on the junior varsity team for which Chad pitched. “You can never imagine sending your child to school and then never seeing him again.”

Kim Carder’s father, Stan, a Simi Valley minister, said Chad’s death not only worries parents, but haunts the boy’s classmates.

“It makes you feel very concerned for your children,” Carder said. “But also, it’s a hard dose of reality for kids at 14 years old to learn. This isn’t Hollywood, where they come back to life. This is the end.”

During the funeral service, Eichele asked the mourners to try to channel their sorrow and anger toward such ends as making Simi Valley a safer community.

“This kind of senseless, mindless violence and killing is a cancer and a powerful force to break down families and schools and communities,” he said. “It is our challenge to correct this terrible and horrible situation. . . . The greatest gift you can give to the Hubbard family is that you learn to open the clenched fist.”

Eichele also reminded the mourners that Chad will never feel hurt or fear again.

“We all take comfort in the fact that Chad has a safe place to shoot his jump shot and throw his fast ball,” he said. “For now and forever.”