Murder Trial Ends With a Restoration of Faith

Skipper’s best friend couldn’t stand it. His nephew stayed away after one visit to Long Beach, unnerved by the evil and menace he felt from the defendant.

It was left to his half brothers, Morris and Richard Stapler, to make it to court every day.

They sat along the aisle through three trials over two years to get to this point Wednesday: The pronouncement of the death sentence for the parolee who killed their half brother, Downey school administrator George “Skipper” Blackwell.

The sentencing of Gilbert Raul Rubio, 39, brought to a close one of Long Beach’s most notorious murder cases, with court actions that dragged on so long and attracted such attention that it morphed from trial to docudrama.

Blackwell, Warren High School vice principal, was murdered in his Long Beach home in January 1998. Rubio was one of three people convicted of the crime. Their three cases took a toll on Blackwell’s family, which saw its grief dissected on screen and in print.

Now that the proceedings are over, the Staplers said, they feel not only satisfied by the outcome but also informed by the hours spent sitting on the hard benches of the Ocean Boulevard courthouse.

Their faith in people, shattered by the murder, has been restored by witnesses and by prosecutors who labored diligently to avenge the crime, they said. And most of all, they came to finally know their brother in a way that made his memory sweeter--and the loss all the more bitter.

“We were older brothers, out doing our own thing while he was growing up,” said Morris, a retired general contractor who lives in Southwest Los Angeles, not far from where he and his siblings grew up. “We didn’t know how much he had done and touched. It was an education.”

George Blackwell had devoted his life to education. Starting two decades ago as a teacher in Fountain Valley, he served as an assistant principal in Ladera Heights and as principal of a Downey elementary school before moving to Warren eight years before his death.

On the evening of Jan. 12, 1998, he was sitting in his newly purchased house near the Long Beach waterfront when the high school’s night custodian, Monica Chavez, came to the door with two men, including her boyfriend Rubio. Blackwell knew Chavez and Rubio; he had given them work at his house.

What he did not know was that Rubio was a parolee with a long history of violence. The vice principal was robbed, forced to write a $2,000 check, and bound with duct tape and a dog chain. After Chavez and the other man, Alex Vega, left to cash the check, Rubio shot and killed Blackwell, according to court testimony. Rubio never testified, and the Stapler brothers have struggled to understand his decision.

“Even after all this, I still don’t know what was going on in his head,” Richard said.

The two brothers first learned of the killing through the TV news. By the time of the arraignment, they were a courtroom fixture: the high-strung Morris, 65, in his sport coats and ties, and the more laid-back Richard, 62, in a ponytail and rancher shirts.

The two grew up in South-Central Los Angeles before moving to Mission Viejo. After a divorce, their mother remarried a contractor named George Blackwell, and in 1951, 17 years after Morris was born, George Blackwell Jr. entered the world.

As a toddler, Blackwell often wore a sailor suit and saluted passersby. Hence, the nickname.

“Skipper . . . was the best in the family at everything,” Morris said. He would be the only one of the three brothers to graduate from college.

He also bound the family together. When his mother was ailing, George spent the better part of a decade caring for her. Only after her death in 1988 did he begin to pursue job advancement.

As Warren High’s vice principal, he meted out discipline with what is remembered as an unusually gentle hand; he preferred stern talks with parents to expulsions, and tried to avoid suspensions.

At the time of his death, he was a doctoral candidate at USC; that degree, he told his brothers, would make him superintendent material.

“George would have gone a long way in education,” said the Warren principal, Earl Haugen.

At the three trials, Morris and Richard saw themselves as Skipper’s stand-ins.

The brothers were there in February, when Vega received a life sentence for murder. They were there in March, when Chavez was convicted and sentenced to life. They heard a jury in June find Rubio guilty and recommend the death penalty. Morris spoke in the penalty phase of each case.

The brothers say that they want Rubio--a parolee from a drug conviction--to die so he cannot hurt anyone else. And they say they intend to closely follow his appeal.

Two of Rubio’s sisters, Teresa Gomez and Sugar Figueroa, say the constant presence of Blackwell’s brothers unfairly pressured the jury into a conviction. And the defense attorneys were hardly more charitable. “It’s sick when you attend a trial every day,” said Bill Bartz, co-counsel to the defense. “Why would you subject yourself to that kind of thing constantly? It’s perverted.”

Still, the brothers say that much of the courtroom became an extended family. Officer J.P. Morgan, who arrested Rubio on the night of the slaying, is considered a friend. They intend to keep in touch with Deputy Dist. Atty. Shawn Randolph, who handled all three cases. “Even with all the things we were seeing in court, we found ourselves always talking about the good times,” said Richard. “I think we’ve become closer.”

But most of all, they became closer to their dead brother by learning what he meant to Warren High. Haugen sometimes joined them in the courtroom gallery. The principal passed along letters and poems and songs from students. “We didn’t know he had reached so many children,” Richard said.

Now, the brothers will say their goodbyes to the Long Beach courthouse and to Warren, which has been changed considerably by Blackwell’s murder.

Warren has established two scholarship funds in Blackwell’s name. It also dedicated a courtyard in the late vice principal’s honor.

Haugen said he has seen less violence in and around the campus since the vice principal died.

“George was in charge of discipline,” he said. “And sad as it is, I think the school learned from this.”

And so have Skipper’s brothers.

“What the school has done and what the prosecutors have done has restored my faith in humanity,” Morris said. “We didn’t have that feeling when the crime took place.”