A Look Back: 1984 - Post office dedicated to slain carrier

The morning of Jan. 4, 1984, Gabriel Deluca, 18, asked his mother “Why would somebody kill somebody else?” according to published reports.

That could be a harmless, maybe thought-provoking question from most people. But in Deluca’s case, the question centered on his defense that he was insane and not aware of what he did just a day earlier: He stabbed and bludgeoned a mail carrier to death and left her body in a Costa Mesa parking lot.

Deluca, a welding student at Orange Coast College, was a shy and, some said, disturbed young man in Huntington Beach who had suffered brain damage a few years before the murder in a mo-ped crash, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Later stories say that on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 1984, Deluca was drunk off tequila and high on marijuana when he waited for his 33-year-old victim, Ida Jean Haxton, a wife and mother of two, to deliver the mail to his Jon Day Drive home.

Haxton, wearing her brown postal worker uniform, didn’t know that just inside one of the homes she’d been delivering mail to for the last three and a half years, waited Deluca with a hunting knife and baseball bat sawed in half.

Deluca stabbed her 19 times in the face, chest and back and hit her just as many times with the bat, according news reports at the time.

Prosecutors claimed his intent was to rape and murder her, though there was no evidence he sexually assaulted Haxton.

Deluca left her body in her postal truck. It was found parked in a Mormon church lot off Placentia Avenue, with her shirt and bra ripped and clothes bloodied.

Authorities brought in bloodhounds from Texas to help find the killer.

The hounds led police to the doorstep of Deluca’s home, where they found bloody evidence leading up to his room, including his shoes.

The weapons were found in the home’s trash cans and a bloody thumbprint was left with Haxton’s body, the Times reported.

Deluca was convicted but had it initially overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. The local Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, and Deluca was sentenced to 26 years to life in prison.

Haxton’s family launched a scholarship in her name. She was the first postal carrier killed on the job in Orange County history.

In 1989, the U.S. Postal Service renamed the Huntington Beach Post Office on Atlanta Avenue after Haxton, only the second time they’d done so.