Memorial set for victim

COSTA MESA — A memorial for a Mission Viejo resident who was fatally stabbed in Costa Mesa on New Year’s Day, has been set for Saturday afternoon.

Robert Sickles’ ashes will be buried in the cemetery at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, family members said Tuesday.

“It’s senseless,” his father, Jim Sickles, 49, said in a phone interview from his Mission Viejo home. “These guys don’t go looking for fights.”

He was referring to his son, Robert, 27, and Robert’s brother, David Sickles, 21, whom Robert had been apparently trying to protect just moments before Robert was stabbed in the chest.

A suspect in the stabbing, Adam Randy Baker, 23, of Dana Point, has since been recuperating from injuries in an area hospital and is in the custody of Costa Mesa police.

Another victim, identified as Brian McTeigue, 26, of Mission Viejo, was also recuperating with stab wounds allegedly inflicted by Baker, police said.

The brothers and McTeigue had just left a New Year’s Eve party at the Orange County/Costa Mesa Hilton hotel when the confrontation occurred, according to police.

According to his father, Robert Sickles, who stood 6-feet-4, was a 2001 graduate of Mission Viejo High School. He served in the Air Force for four years, where he worked as a structural mechanic for F-16 aircraft.

During Robert’s military stint, he lived in San Antonio and was also stationed in Japan and, most recently, in Utah, Sickles said.

Sickles said his son would make repairs to sheet metal in the fuselage of jetfighters, and that Robert had hoped to attend college in the fall.

“He wanted to study physics, or something technical,” Sickles said. “He was very good mechanically. He felt confident that he was going to get into the University of Oregon.”

Saturday’s 1 p.m. memorial will take place at the Norman P. Murray Community Center, 24932 Veterans Way, in Mission Viejo.

Of his son’s memorial, Sickles said, “it will be strictly a gathering of anyone who knew him and wants to be with him.”