The one friend of Sam’s who could relate to the way he interacted with his family was Juri “Julie” Kibuishi. Although her Japanese-born parents seemed to be more proper than the free-spirited Juri, she clearly cherished them. When the family was together—Juri was the third of four siblings, and the first girl—her laugh infected everyone. While the elder Kibuishis might have questioned some of her unconventional decisions, they’d always encouraged her artistic impulses. Like Sam, she had a habit of checking in with her family and reminding her parents that she loved them.
Friends remembered dropping in at the Kibuishi home and seeing Juri and her mother on the couch raptly watching Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, a reality show featuring salon owner Tabatha Coffey swooping in and saving failing beauty shops. And Juri was close with the rest of the family, as well. In fact, the last communication that she had before she died was with her brother Taka.
Steve and Raquel first met Juri when they stopped by their son’s apartment and found her there, helping him study. Sam explained that Juri—a fashion student at Orange Coast College—was tutoring him in anthropology and he needed her help for an upcoming test.
Once the books were closed, the Herrs invited Juri to join the rest of the family for dinner. She was animated and drew people out. As with his friend Theresa in the Army, Sam, the only child, treated Juri like a sister. She had an open invitation to crash on his couch whenever she didn’t feel like making the fifteen-minute drive back to her home in Irvine. To the Herrs, it was obvious that the relationship was strictly platonic. Regardless, Steve and Raquel were completely charmed.
“Julie and Sam—I didn’t see much difference between the two of them,” said Ruben Menacho. “They both talked to everybody. They had a lot of friends.”
Juri’s posts on MySpace, which had recently been overtaken by Facebook as the world’s largest social media destination, provided a window into her personality. She listed her tastes as comedy and romance movies, poetry by Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, the television shows LA Ink, Project Runway, and Dancing with the Stars, and music ranging from country, to jazz, to trance, house, and hard rock. There was also a tribute to the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
As carefree as she appeared, she also spoke about showing strength, despite adverse predicaments. “What doesn’t kill you,” she wrote, “only makes you stronger.”
Her recommendations to online friends: “For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others. For beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness. And for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
In her personal history, Juri emphasized the fact that she’d been born in Newport Beach on Valentine’s Day, a coincidence that seemed to suit her world view. “She was a hopeless romantic,” remembered her friend Natalie Jameson Sommer. Having witnessed her parents’ long marriage, Juri also hoped to find the perfect mate and raise a family.
In fact, she described her mood on MySpace as “in love.” “I’m laid back, dorky, sweet, loving,” she wrote.
Five years after the murder, childhood friend Jessica Wolf grinned at the memory of Juri’s vigorous laugh. “I can still hear it,” Jessica said. “It was kind of a cartoony, funny laugh. I can’t even mimic it. It was a ‘just explode’ kind of laugh. She was kind of a goofy person—in the best way. I think of Julie and it makes me giggle.
“I don’t have any bad memories about her. I can’t think of any time when she made me feel anything bad. Nothing she did bothered me. And you can’t say that about everyone. I could find twenty things about me I don’t like. But she was just this good person.”
When Jessica and Natalie decided to share their memories about Juri, they arranged a meeting at the Disneyland Hotel during the regional Showstopper competition, featuring performers from dance academies all over Orange County. It was a place where Juri would have felt at home. She met Jessica in the fifth grade at the Irvine Dance Academy, later the FOCUS Dance Center for the Performing Arts. Every year, the girls participated in the Showstopper regionals. At five foot three, Juri—a standout softball player as a child—was known as an athletic, creative dancer, hardworking and quick on her feet, particularly in tap.
“We spent a big portion of our lives growing up in the Disneyland Hotel,” Jessica said as contestants simultaneously competed nearby in three separate ballrooms, each containing a trio of stages.
It was noisy in the lobby, so Jessica and Natalie led a visitor to an escalator. At the top, they instinctively turned a corner, then another, before settling in a quiet collection of couches just outside the Magic Kingdom Ballroom.
“We know all the nooks and crannies,” Jessica explained.
“This is where we go and hide out,” Natalie concurred.
For Juri and her friends, dance was not a hobby but a lifestyle. Some students began going to the studio at age three and continued through high school. “You train five to seven days a week with your teammates at a dance studio,” Jessica said. “It’s hard to describe to someone who isn’t part of it.”
“You go until eighteen, and then you go to college,” Natalie said. “Most of us become a dance instructor or a professional dancer. I definitely went the teacher route, but Jessica did some dancing professionally.”
During Disneyland’s fiftieth-anniversary commemorations, Jessica appeared in the Parade of Dreams, performing on the theme park’s Main Street. She also danced with Beyoncé in her “Run the World” music video. “Watch it on YouTube,” Jessica suggested. “You’ll see me. I’m the only blonde. I rep it for the white girls.”
Removing her phone, Jessica displayed a photo of her, Juri, and a group of other girls at around twelve or thirteen, posing outside their dance studio. “I remember there was so much drama because we’d already been dancing all day and now we had to put on our costumes again and go up on this hill. And we were being yelled at to go up on this hill, and everyone was in a bad mood.” She pointed at another female in the picture. “That’s Julie’s cousin, Cathy. She danced with us and Julie’s little sister danced for a company called Jet. I remember seeing her sister dance a solo a couple of times.” She stared at the photo. “We all danced together forever.”
As an adult, Jessica would tell her students that their dance friends would be the ones who’d end up in their wedding parties and babysitting their children. “You’re just connected. In high school, you start to migrate to other studios, but you always know what everyone is doing. I’m way closer to my dance friends than any of my school friends.
“You live together. You’re in rehearsals for hours, sweaty and running out after midnight to get food. It becomes such a family in a dance setting.”
What makes the Orange County dance world distinct is the presence of Disneyland as a backdrop to virtually everything. Even outside the fences, children sit on their fathers’ shoulders, watching the amusement park’s fireworks display lighting up the night sky, some fantasizing about playing a character one day in a Disney movie. It’s this dream that may have enticed Dan Wozniak to try out for high school musicals—and Juri to go to a specialized school to study dance.
Both Natalie and Juri attended the Orange County School of the Arts, then catering to high school students interested in the performing, visual, literary, and culinary arts. In order to gain acceptance to the dance department, both were required to pass an audition.
“She was beautiful; she was graceful; she was strong; she was emotional,” Juri’s high school jazz instructor, Cindy Peca-Dolan, would tell ABC News. “Julie’s kindness was really immeasurable.… She was very warm and talented and compassionate … very fun to watch onstage.”
A year apart in school, Natalie and Juri lost touch after Juri graduated. But when they saw each other again at Orange Coast College their friendship became stronger than it had ever been.
As a fashion major, Juri hoped to find an internship at an Orange County action-sports company, like Quicksilver, which specialized in surfwear, among other items. But she continued to take dance seriously. In between classes, she and Natalie would chat and joke together outside the dance room. Occasionally, Juri invited Natalie for frozen yogurt or to her home, driving there in a green Toyota Corolla with an iPod dock in the glove compartment. Among their other music preferences, each liked specific Orange County metal bands. Natalie listened to Atreyu, while Juri regularly played Avenged Sevenfold.
Twice a week, they attended ballet class at college. “I remember watching Julie and thinking, ‘You’re so good, I hate you,’” Natalie joked. “She had flexibility, really nice feet, beautiful turnout. She was just such a natural. It was hard to take class with her because we’d be at the barre together and I was like, ‘You make me look really bad.’”
Yet, despite her composure, Juri never took herself too seriously and invariably found a way to make everyone laugh. During one phase, she wore her dance pants unusually high. “They were flare-bottom yoga pants,” Natalie said. “She practically wore them up to here.” She pointed at the area just below her breasts. “She would roll them like a hundred times, where they were really low and you could see her undershorts. We’d be standing, but then we’d have to move, and your butt would stick out, so we’d wear tight shorts underneath.”
Jessica had similar memories: “We’d make her unroll them. I’d say, ‘Julie, just unroll it two rolls and we’ll be perfect.’”
While other dancers would wipe the makeup from their faces before class, Juri stood at the barre in full eyeliner and flourescent green eye shadow. “She was brave with her eye shadow,” Jessica said. “She’d wear bright colors, and looked beautiful with it. And her skin was perfect. I don’t think I ever saw her with a pimple.”
To further accessorize herself, Juri accentuated her hair with a flower, like a pinup girl. “Everything matched,” Jessica said. “She was the pinup girl with the rolled-up pants.”
In a photo from the era, Juri and a group of friends are going to the Orange County Fair. As the others smile, Juri scrunches up her face, sticks her tongue out of the side of her mouth, and gestures at Natalie with a long, colorful fingernail.
For a period, Juri was dating someone who worked at the Irvine Spectrum, an outdoor shopping center featuring a Ferris wheel, carousel, and twenty-one-screen movie complex, and she had his three initials tattooed on the back of her neck. When they broke up, she and Natalie went to a tattoo shop in Newport Beach, where Juri had the etching covered up with a black cross.
“She x-ed it out,” Natalie said. “When people would ask about the cross, she’d say, ‘I don’t know. It’s a religious thing.’ I don’t even remember if she was Christian.”
Like her eye makeup and long fingernails, body art was a way Juri asserted her individuality. She had a total of six piercings and seven tattoos and intended to get more, like one of her fashion heroes, model, musician, tattoo artist, and TV personality Kat Von D. “She liked Kat Von D’s ‘just, like, whatever’ attitude,” Natalie said. “I know she tried to hide her tattoos from her parents, but as far as everyone else went, she’d say, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want to do, and not worry about what other people think of me.’”
One day, Juri walked up to Natalie, pointed at her wrist, and declared, “Look what I got.”
It was a new tattoo of two intertwined hearts—the same tattoo Natalie had to formalize her relationship with the man who’d become her husband.
Once again, Juri had managed to make Natalie burst out in laughter. “She never even told me about it beforehand. She just got the same tattoo I had. She was impulsive in a fun way. But the hearts meant something to her because she believed in love.”
In 2010, she excitedly told friends about an online relationship with Mark Johnson, a Marine corporal stationed in Okinawa. She branded herself “Cpl. Johnson’s Sweetheart” on MySpace and posted a photo of Johnson in uniform. “I’m proud to say that he is [one of] the few and the proud,” she wrote, paraphrasing the Marine motto, “and truly knows how to make me laugh, smile and [be] happy. He comes back to the States in June.”
But by the time the corporal returned to the mainland, the high-spirited, lovable fashion student was already dead.