Woman Held in Slayings of 4 Sons Improves

Susan Eubanks continued to recover Tuesday from an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound as the San Diego County medical examiner completed autopsies on her four sons and prosecutors began pondering whether to seek the death penalty for Eubanks after Sunday’s bloody rampage.

Eubanks, 33, underwent 90 minutes of abdominal surgery at Palomar Medical Center in nearby Escondido where she once worked as a medical technician. She remains sedated and a sheriff’s deputy was stationed at her hospital room door.

A bedside arraignment is tentatively set for today on four counts of murder in the slayings of Matthew Eubanks, 4, Brigham Eubanks, 6, Austin Eubanks, 7, and Brandon Armstrong, 14.

Prosecutors will allege special circumstances in the slayings, legalese that preserves their right to seek the death penalty once Eubanks has been ordered to stand trial.

“These are the ultimate senseless killings: a mother killing her children,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Greg Thompson.

Meanwhile, the circumstances leading up to the killings and the role of alcohol in the troubled lives of the Eubanks family became more clear Tuesday.

A bartender at a bar where Eubanks, her boyfriend and her estranged husband were regulars said Eubanks spent the hours before the killings at the bar, watching the San Diego Chargers-Indianapolis Colts game and drinking steadily with her boyfriend.

Both Eubanks and her estranged husband, Eric Dale Eubanks, had legal problems because of their drinking. In 1996 Susan Eubanks was convicted of drunk driving and ordered to undergo counseling and attend sessions of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

On Sunday, Eubanks, who was known to have a temper, seemed edgy and agitated, the bartender said. “She acted very different, even the other customers thought so,” she said.

According to the Sheriff’s Department, Eubanks and her boyfriend, Rene Dobson, a construction worker with a liking for fishing and sports, began arguing at the bar. Dobson decided to end the volatile relationship and went to Eubanks’ ramshackle home to retrieve some clothes and carpentry tools.

Eubanks and Dobson continued to quarrel loudly and deputies were called to keep the two from coming to blows. The two-bedroom home on South Twin Oaks Valley Road is well known to deputies, who have made repeated calls there to answer Eubanks’ allegations of being beaten and harassed by her husband.

Dobson said Tuesday that Eubanks was given to sharp mood swings, had made threats against her children in the past and began hitting him Sunday after he said he wanted to end the relationship.

Just hours after Dobson left Sunday, deputies again returned to the home and were horrified to find three of the boys dead, a fourth near death and Eubanks lying on the floor of her bedroom, with a gun nearby.

Eric Eubanks, 37, went back to the home Tuesday, packing up belongings and talking of moving away. “He looked devastated,” a neighbor said. “You could tell he’d been up for awhile. I asked if he needed help and he just shook his head.”

The hilly area of San Marcos where the Eubanks family lived, about 40 miles north of San Diego, is crossed by gravel roads and dotted by barnyard fowl.

The boys in the family were seen playing football and riding bicycles. The family had a garden and grew pumpkins. Dobson had become close to the boys during his relationship with their mother and would walk them to the school bus stop in the morning.

“He said they were wonderful little boys who loved school and loved life,” the bartender said.

A neighbor said of the boys: “They seemed like happy little kids. If one fell down, the others would help him up.”

But another remembered Eubanks yelling at the boys, and said the boys could often be heard crying at night.

On Sunday afternoon, as deputies arrived to referee between Eubanks and Dobson, the boys hid in the cluttered yard. “They were in total fear,” said one neighbor.

Eubanks and her husband of nine years had separated six times when she decided in September to file for divorce. Twice she received restraining orders against him after telling authorities that she feared for her life.

An arrest warrant was issued last week for Eric Eubanks, a cabinetmaker, after he refused to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that had been ordered as a condition of probation for a June conviction for spousal battery. He was also arrested recently on charges of drunk driving.

The autopsies found that three of the boys were killed by a single shot to the head from a .38-caliber gun fired at close range. Only Brigham Eubanks showed wounds consistent with more than one shot.

Thompson said the San Diego County district attorney’s office uses a system akin to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office in deciding whether to seek the death penalty.

The trial prosecutor and his or her boss will make a recommendation to a panel of senior prosecutors. That panel will then make a recommendation to Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst, a first-termer who has shown willingness to seek the death penalty. The decision to seek a death penalty rests with Pfingst.

Thompson said that in all possible death penalty cases, conflicting factors are considered; for example, the emotional state of the accused killer at the time of the slaying, and the vulnerability of the victims.

“The bond between mother and child is considered so strong, that in a case like this you just start out with an assumption that anyone who could do this was operating with an emotional problem, and that’s a factor,” Thompson said.

“But on the other side, this is the murder of children, the most vulnerable victims, and that has to be factored in too. It will be a very tough decision.”

Correspondent Renee Martin contributed to this story.