Death penalty ordered in boat owners’ murders

A Santa Ana jury Thursday ordered the death penalty for a 29-year-old man convicted of three murders, including those of a Newport Beach couple who were lashed to the anchor of their yacht and thrown overboard into the ocean.

Skylar Deleon was convicted Oct. 21 in the 2004 slayings of Tom and Jackie Hawks, who had spent nearly two years plying the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean before deciding to sell the boat to move closer to family in Arizona. Deleon also was found guilty of the 2003 killing of John Peter Jarvi, an Anaheim man found dead in Mexico after Deleon stole $50,000 from him.

Deleon’s attorney, Gary Pohlson, had conceded his client’s guilt but told jurors that Deleon deserved to be spared the death penalty because he had been abused as a child and was not the manipulative genius prosecutors made him out to be. Family members testified that Deleon had an extremely troubled childhood and was emotionally and physically abused by his father.

But the five-man, seven-woman jury was swayed by the prosecutor’s arguments that Deleon had committed the murders out of greed and plotted with accomplices to steal the Hawks’ yacht, plunder their back accounts and ruthlessly murder his victims. Lead prosecutor Matt Murphy also called on an expert witness to show that being abused does not lead to murder.

Jurors deliberated a day and a half before recommending that Deleon should die by lethal injection rather than spending the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

As the verdict was read, Deleon remained poker-faced and expressionless. “I told him to expect it,” Pohlson told reporters outside court. “He was hopeful. We were all hopeful.”

Ryan Hawks, Tom Hawks’ son from a previous marriage, hugged the jurors outside the courtroom and thanked them. Hawks, 32, testified during the penalty phase. He and his brother were raised by Jackie Hawks, whom he considered his mother.

“It’s just a sigh of relief,” Ryan Hawks said. “We’ve waited four years for this. It was difficult for the jury to make a decision on somebody’s life, but I absolutely agreed with their decision.”

-- My-Thuan Tran