The mother of Joseph McStay wept on the witness stand Tuesday as she recounted the moment in November 2013 when she learned the remains of her son, his wife, and their boys aged 3 and 4, missing for more than three years, had been found buried in the High Desert near Victorville.
“It can’t be,” Susan Blake testified after she regained herself. “What about the little guys? And they told me they were also gone. I just don’t remember very much because I fell to the office floor. How can you take that all in?”
She said it was not until six months later that she could bear to go out to the site, marked by four crosses. “I just dropped me to my knees … I will never go back to that spot,” she told San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Melissa Rodriguez.
Blake’s testimony came during the second day in the capital murder trial of Charles “Chase” Merrit, 61, of Rancho Cucamonga. The trial in the downtown San Bernardino Justice Center is before Judge Michael A. Smith.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges that he killed McStay, 40, a former business associate; his wife, Summer, 43, and their two children, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, in their Fallbrook home on Feb. 4, 2010, then buried their bodies more than 100 miles away — in two shallow graves in the Mojave Desert, north of Victorville and west of the 15 Freeway.
The family had moved to Fallbrook, 45 miles north of San Diego, in November 2009 from San Clemente. They were in the process of remodeling their four-bedroom, three-bathroom home when they went missing.
The family had been beaten to death with a three-pound sledgehammer found in one of the graves. Sheriff’s investigators believe Summer McStay may have been raped before she was killed.
The bodies were found in November 2013 and Merritt was arrested and charged a year later.
During her morning testimony, Blake also described heated arguments between Merritt and Dan Kavanaugh, both business partners in McStay’s decorative fountain business. She said they clashed in front of her as they argued how to keep the business going.
During that period, she got an early-morning call from someone in Saudi Arabia, demanding his fountain, she recalled
And she recounted for Rodriguez how she gave $4,410 in personal checks to Merritt in the months after her son and his family disappeared, based on Merritt’s claims he needed the money to complete projects for the business.
“He asked for funds to keep the business going, and at that time I would do anything to help my son — probably not in my right mind anyway at that time,” she said.
“You just do what you can for your son, and your family,” she said.
She had asked to get the money back, she said, “But I never saw any.”
Blake had told an investigator that Merritt told her he completed a job for a customer in Saudi Arabia and was paid $17,000. But when Rodriguez questioned her Tuesday, Blake said, “That’s what was said, but I don’t know for sure.”
Defense attorney Rajan Maline produced a check to Merritt for $3,300 that was issued in April 2010 and signed by Blake, not on her personnel account, but on an account for Earthinspiredproducts.com.
The back of the check said “endorsement cancelled,” he pointed out. Working through prosecutor Rodriguez’s objections, Maline asked Blake, “Do remember if it bounced?”
“I don’t remember bouncing a check,” she said.
“Do you remember writing that check?” he asked. “I see it’s written, yes,” she answered, confirming it was her signature.
“If you were trying to save the business, Ms. Blake, what steps did you take to learn about the funds that were coming into the business and going out of the business,” Maline asked, surviving an objection from Rodriguez.
“I was just trying to keep the customers or whoever was calling calm … and hopefully to keep the business going. Obviously there wasn’t money coming in, ’cause I was paying for money going out.”
“So to your knowledge,” Maline said, “there is no money coming in, or you didn’t learn of any money coming in.”
Merritt’s defense team has claimed Kavanaugh is a likely suspect in the McStay family case, but was overlooked by investigators despite what they described as a deteriorating relationship with Joseph McStay in the months before the family’s disappearance.
Kavanaugh has denied any involvement in the family’s disappearance and slayings.
Merritt and Kavanaugh both worked with McStay’s online business, Earth Inspired Products, which offered outdoor water fountains to customers. Merritt built fountains, while Kavanaugh designed EIP’s website and did search engine optimization.
The break came, defense attorneys said, when Merritt and McStay separately worked on a custom-fountain side of the business that did not include Kavanaugh.
Blake said Merritt and Kavanugh got into arguments in two meetings during the spring of 2010. She said the two tangled over how to keep the business afloat.
In the last of the two meetings, “They were definitely yelling, big time, at each other. Arguing, and Dan just wasn’t going to budge,” she said. “It was to me, at the time, very scary, so I literally walked out and said ‘If my son loses his business, so be it, I need to find my family’ and I left.”
Under questioning by Rodriguez, Blake described the argument as filled with “A lot of, lot of cussing, screaming at each other … Chase wanted to wring his neck.”
Maline asked Blake about the point of that argument, again struggling against Rodriguez’s objections: “Chase is telling (Kavanaugh) that he is a liar, that he is getting the money and not giving it to him,” he managed to outline to the witness.
“I did not know any of that part,” Blake said.
Blake was followed in testimony by her son and Joseph McStay’s brother, Michael McStay who said Joseph gave him $2,000 to start his fire sprinkler system business.
Joseph was his older brother, by ” three years, two months, three days,” he told San Bernardino County Supervising Deputy District Attorney Sean Daugherty.
“Did you always look up to him” Daugherty asked. “Yes, sir,” McStay replied. “Why?” Daugherty asked, and Michael broke down on the witness stand.
“Sorry … because he was worth it,” he told Daugherty.
Testimony in the trial is scheduled to continue Wednesday.