WOODLAND — The character of Woodland murder defendant Susan Hoskins took center stage this week in Yolo Superior Court — as did that of Bryan Hoskins Sr., the husband she’s accused of killing.
Relatives, former co-workers and neighbors of the couple took the stand Wednesday and Thursday as defense witnesses, called to support claims that Bryan Hoskins was an alcoholic, abusive husband, and that Susan Hoskins likely feared for her life the night she fatally shot him.
She’s charged with murder and unlawful discharge of a firearm in connection with the Aug. 3, 2014, shooting in the kitchen of their Knollwood Drive condominium. She has pleaded not guilty.
“Honest,” “trustworthy” and “law-abiding” were the words witnesses used to describe Susan Hoskins, under the questioning of her lawyers Shannan Dugan and J. Tony Serra. For Bryan Hoskins, they offered a different set of adjectives.
“When Bryan was drunk he would be a mean son of a bitch,” Rachel Gallegos, Susan Hoskins’ onetime co-worker at Woodland Healthcare, recalled the defendant telling her one day. She said Hoskins also confided that she and her husband were living apart, and that Bryan Hoskins went through bouts of binge drinking every few months.
At about the same time, Susan Hoskins suffered a series of stressors in her life, including a workplace fall that broke her collarbone, as well as the death of her father in February 2014, about five months before the shooting.
“She was taking it rather hard,” testified Nina Stadler, a medical assistant at Woodland Clinic. “She was very upset — you could see it in the way she talked about him.”
But colleagues rarely, if ever, saw Susan Hoskins in her husband’s presence and under cross-examination by prosecutors denied personally observing episodes of abuse. Stadler said she once spotted a red mark on her co-worker’s arm, but Hoskins chalked it up to “being a klutz,” she said.
Bryan Hoskins’ alcohol abuse also caught the attention of his wife’s family members, who said he would drink to the point of getting sick and passing out.
The defendant’s mother, Reba Rodriguez, described her late son-in-law as “quiet and respectful” around her, performing household tasks after her husband died. But she also noticed an edge to his relationship with her daughter.
“There would be times when there were little innuendos, more than yelling,” Rodriguez said. She called it a “subtle” form of abuse, “egging you on, trying to stir things up.”
Those who were around Bryan Hoskins on a more regular basis — including his Woodland neighbors and his co-workers at the Yolo County Probation Department, where he was the assistant superintendent of Juvenile Hall — described a more aggressive personality.
Former colleagues described Hoskins as “intimidating,” constantly finding fault with their work and occasionally “hiding out” at work project sites to observe them on the job, even on his days off.
Daniel Hoffman, a onetime Juvenile Hall detention officer, said Hoskins once questioned his handling of a transportation incident in which a juvenile ward was spitting on other youths. Asked what he would have done differently, Hoskins suggested a reverse wrist hold, a pain compliance technique that was against department policy, Hoffman said.
Hoffman said he turned away from Hoskins after the conversation ended, after which Hoskins suddenly bent his wrist and pulled his arm up behind his back, his hand nearly reaching the nape of his neck.
“This is what I would have done,” Hoskins hissed, according to Hoffman. Hoskins was placed on administrative leave following the incident and later retired, he added.
In his neighborhood, “he walked around like he owned the place,” testified Patricia Wilkinson, whose Knollwood Drive condominium was two doors down from the one the couple shared. The Hoskinses also kept a second nearby condo, where Bryan Hoskins would live when the marriage was strained.
Wilkinson recalled having confrontations with Hoskins over his failure to leash his pet Rottweiler in violation of homeowner association rules, and observed that his demeanor seemed to change for the worst after he stopped working for the Probation Department.
“I felt that he was a very angry person,” she said, though noting that she never saw him take his fury out on his wife. “He just seemed like he hated the world, and he was going to take other people down with him.”
The trial resumes Friday and continues next week, with Susan Hoskins expected to take the witness stand in her own defense as early as Monday afternoon.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene