Death Row inmate found dead in cell
A man who was sentenced to death for murdering his wife and motherinlaw in their Burlingame home in 1991 has died in San Quentin State Prison, officials said.
Phillip Jablonski, 73, was found unconscious in his cell on Friday and was pronounced dead 20 minutes later, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported Monday. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death.
Jablonski was on parole in Southern California, after serving 12 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend in 1978, when he drove to San Mateo County in April 1991 and fatally shot Carol Spadoni, 47, who had married him while he was in prison. He also raped, sodomized and fatally shot her mother, Eva Petersen, 72.
A day earlier, he had killed another woman, Fathyma
Vann, who was taking automotive classes with him in Riverside County. He pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to life without parole, his lawyer said.
A Vietnam War veteran, Jablonski was discharged from the military with what was described as a schizophrenic illness in 1968. Shortly before he killed his girlfriend, Linda Kimball, in 1978, she twice tried to have him admitted to a veterans hospital, but the hospital refused to accept him, the state Supreme Court said in a 2006 ruling upholding his murder convictions and death sentence.
The court said Jablonski had also committed several rapes, tried to suffocate his first wife, and assaulted his mother when she visited him in prison in 1985.
Two psychiatrists testified at Jablonski’s 1994 trial that he was schizophrenic. But one of them and another therapist said he knew right from wrong, and a jury found that he had been sane when he murdered Spadoni and her mother.
In the 2006 ruling, the court unanimously upheld the San Mateo County trial judge’s decision to let jurors hear Jablonski’s taperecorded description of the murders to rebut defense arguments that he was incompetent to stand trial.
Since 1978, when California’s current death penalty law took effect, the state has executed 13 prisoners, two have been executed in other states where they had also been sentenced to death, 82 have died of natural causes, 27 have committed suicide and 14 have died from other causes, including drug overdoses and prison slayings, officials said. Five other deaths, including Jablonski’s, are under review.
The state has 728 inmates on the nation’s largest Death Row. California’s last execution was conducted in 2006.