Man Sentenced for Murdering Wife

A 32-year-old Fullerton man was sentenced Friday to 26 years to life in prison for stabbing his estranged wife to death several months after she had obtained a court order to keep him away.

Steven Todd Summers contended he never meant to kill his wife and was acting in an “unconscious state” brought on by diabetes-related acute low blood sugar.

However, an Orange County Superior Court jury convicted him last month of first-degree murder in the March 1995 slaying of Brenda Suzanne Summers outside a Fullerton restaurant.

“He killed what he couldn’t have,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Diana Gomez said.

The victim’s parents and sister said they hoped Summers would never be free.

“Brenda, God bless her, she was at last taking the steps to become independent from him,” her mother, Priscilla Morales, wrote to Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno.

Summers did not make any statements during sentencing, except to offer his prayers to his slain wife’s family.

The 28-year-old Placentia woman was repeatedly stabbed in the throat, face and side outside a restaurant after she noticed her husband was following her, and had asked a friend who was driving her to pull over. She had just dropped off their daughter at the home of her husband’s parents.

Steven Summers, who contended he was carrying the knife that day because he feared for his life, surrendered to police the next day.

The attack ended a tumultuous two-year marriage in which police received several complaints of domestic violence, according to court records.

Steven Summers, a former community college linebacker, pleaded guilty in December 1994 to misdemeanor charges of spousal abuse and to assault and battery. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and ordered to undergo counseling. Brenda Summers obtained a restraining order against him after the assault, in which he knocked her unconscious and burned her feet with a curling iron.