Stepson talks to jury for 1st time

Newport Beach couple Tom and Jackie Hawks appeared sublime.

Through various clips, the couple’s sailing adventures over two years are marked with trips to La Paz, Mexico, and Santa Catalina Island. In one clip, Jackie is tracking a whale shark just off their boat’s starboard side. In another, the couple are sailing among a pod of dolphins.

In a final, ominous clip, the two are having dinner with friends aboard their boat, the “Well Deserved,” and saying how they’ll miss it because they’ve found someone to buy it.

That someone was Skylar Deleon, 29. He now faces the death penalty for killing the couple less than a week after that last clip was shot by Jackie Hawks.

The only time Deleon looked at the video screen was in the last 40 seconds, when the video cut from the Hawkses to a Thanksgiving gathering of his family, which he had recorded over the Hawkses clips after prosecutors say he stole their camera following the murders.

That’s what the second half of Wednesday’s testimony at Central Justice Center in Santa Ana amounted to — a window into the lives of Deleon’s victims, John Jarvi, who was killed in 2003, and the Hawkses, murdered at sea in November 2004.

“I think of them in the morning when I wake up, I think of them at night when I go to bed. I think of their family, the pain everyone’s going through,” testified Gayle O’Neill, Jackie Hawks’ mother.

O’Neill was one of several relatives of victims prosecutors called to testify Wednesday as part of the penalty phase of Deleon’s trial. Deleon was convicted last week of murdering Jarvi and the Hawkses. Now attorneys will make their case before the same jury why or why not Deleon should be sentenced to death.

Deleon’s ex-wife, Jennifer Henderson, was convicted for her role in the Hawks murders last year and was sentenced to life without parole.

Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy wanted to humanize the victims, he said.

“[John Jarvi] was very clever, he sparkled, he had friends you could hardly believe. He was brilliant, he was ornery,” said Jarvi’s mother, Betty. She recalled traveling to Mexico to identify her son’s body, days after his throat had been slashed in the desert. She said she missed him. They would go out to dinner three or four times a week and he was the son she’d turn to to fix things around the house or just carry on a conversation.

Ryan Hawks, Tom’s son and Jackie’s stepson, testified for the first time about his parents.

While Ryan Hawks told jurors that his dad was his best friend, Murphy pressed for something more specific.

“I remember growing up as a teenager. It’s kind of like, he was against me, I remember him grounding me for being a teenager and some of the things I did,” he said. “I remember him telling me, grounded on weekends, ‘You think I want to be here with you [complaining]? I’d be failing my job as a parent if I let you go off.’ You’ll thank me some day.”

“I never got to thank him,” he added.

Jurors heard prosecutors for the first time say that jail did not stop Deleon from trying to kill more. While in jail as his two murder cases separately worked through the courts, Deleon approached two inmates he thought could help “get rid of” witnesses in his case, prosecutors said. Deleon asked the men to kill his father, his cousin and at least two others involved in the 2004 murders, witnesses testified.

The testimony goes to the heart of the prosecution’s argument that Deleon is an unrepentant liar who does whatever he has to to get out of a jam. All the witnesses’ stories traced a similar path: Deleon lied to them, sometimes without their knowing it, to benefit himself.

The penalty phase of the trial will continue Monday with the defense’s case. Defense attorney Gary Pohlson said Deleon’s family members will testify on his behalf and psychologists could testify about what effects abuse as a child had on him.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at [email protected].