Sister of man convicted of killing their parents tells court of her unbearable loss
The Modesto man convicted of paying a friend to murder his parents for financial gain has been sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The couple’s daughter was the only person to give a victim impact statement before her brother, Brandon Pettit, was sentenced on Friday.
Unlike most sentencing hearings in which family and friends of the victim excoriate the defendant, Lauren Pettit said she would “continue to support his innocence.”
A jury in September convicted Brandon Pettit of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his parents David “Scott” Pettit and Janet Pettit. They’d been shot and their bodies set on fire in the bedroom of their north Modesto home on Divan Court on Aug. 8, 2013.
“Hearing the guilty verdict was excruciating,” Lauren Pettit said through tears. “It kills me to think about this. There is no greater pain than the pain of losing your entire family.”
The prosecution said Brandon Pettit told multiple people he wanted his parents dead and that he had given co-defendant Felix Valverde bullets, the keys to his parents’ house and a $500 down payment to carry out the crimes. Valverde is being tried separately.
The defense argued that because Brandon Pettit has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, he said things or behaved in a manner counter to social norms, that Valverde acted alone while Brandon Pettit was working a graveyard shift as a security guard in another city, and that Valverde easily could have entered the home through a large dog door.
Upon their deaths Brandon Pettit stood to gain almost $1 million in his half of life insurance policies on his parents, their home and several rental homes and seven expensive vehicles, including a Corvette that Scott Pettit had brought as a project car for himself and his son, according to the prosecution.
Lauren Pettit testified for the defense during the two-and-a-half-week trial so she wasn’t allowed to listen to the rest of the testimony.
“Even though I didn’t get the hear the prosecution’s case I knew there was no way my brother could do this,” she said in court Friday.
‘We were their greatest joy’
In her statement, Lauren described her mother, a well-respected and successful nurse practitioner, and father, owner of a Riverbank Tae Kwon Do business active in the community.
She said Janet Pettit was a ‘pioneer in her field,’ ‘brilliant but modest’ and devoted advocate for Brandon in his struggles with learning disabilities. Lauren Pettit recalled going to a work function with her mother that turned out to be a black tie event in her mother’s honor.
She said Scott Pettit worked many jobs - as a paramedic, a white water river rafting guide, a landscaper and a dispatcher - but found his true calling when he opened his first Tae Kwon Do business. He operated the business in several cities but it was when he moved it to Riverbank that he truly found community, becoming a regular in the Christmas Parade, organizing an annual toy drive, and putting on the haunted hay ride at Halloween.
Despite their busy schedules Lauren Pettit said her parents rarely missed so much as a soccer game for her and Brandon.
“We were their greatest joy and they made sure we knew that,” she said.
Lauren Pettit described her life since waking up on the morning of her parents’ deaths and texting a friend, “Today is going to be a good day.” Later that morning she got a call from a Modesto Police Department detective who told her her parents were dead.
When she learned a few days later that they’d been murdered she said she didn’t think her pain could get any worse until she found out her brother was a suspect.
“How could they possibly think my brother, my kind and loving little brother, who was often described by others as a big teddy bear, had something to do with our parents’ murders?” she said in court.
Lauren Pettit said when she dropped her brother off for an interview with a detective, “Little did I know that (it) ... would be the last time he’d get to see the world as a free man, the last time I’d get to hug him, share a meal with him or have a conversation with him that isn’t recorded.”
She said her grief was compounded many more times in the months that followed: dealing with the threat of a lawsuit by an insurance company, getting a her parents’ death certificate that listed every place on their bodies they’d been shot and picking up her mother’s burned butterfly necklace from the morgue.
“And yet picking out the urns my parents would be placed in was the hardest,” she said. “It was a pain like none other. How do you pick out an urn for someone you can’t bring yourself to say goodbye to?”
Two life sentences
At the end of her statement Lauren Pettit addressed her brother, “My wish for you ... is that this life becomes all that you want it to, that you continue to dream big and that your worries stay small. But most of all I hope you know just how much I love you.”
Lauren Pettit asked the judge, Thomas Zeff for leniency, to release her brother on probation, and to waive any restitution because she would be the one who’d have to pay it.
At the beginning of the hearing Zeff addressed a claim Brandon Pettit’s attorney, Robert Winston, made during a hearing in October. Winston said he’d been informed of possible juror misconduct and planned to seek a new trial.
But because Winston never filed any motions or affidavits to support the claim Zeff said he would move forward with sentencing.
After listening to Lauren Pettit’s statement, Zeff imposed the maximum sentence of life without parole and ordered Brandon Pettit to pay more than $1,000 in restitution fees.
Some judges speak to the impacts of a crime on survivors or the community when imposing a sentence but Zeff stuck to the legal reasons.
He said Brandon Pettit was statutorily ineligible to be sentenced to probation and that the two life sentences should be served consecutively “because there were multiple victims and the crimes involved separate acts of violence.”
