Speaker 1
that it's happening. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. My name is Angela. I live here in Santa Clarita. I work in the cruise industry. I work in the corporate office, so not on the cruise ships themselves. I work on the customer service side of life. So I grew up in LA, so like Melrose, Fairfax area. I went to Fairfax High School. My family immigrated back in like, I was two, so like 74. And we pretty much lived in that same small area, that neighborhood, from that point on. So I want to say I was my first year into high school. Just a high school kid, hanging out with my friends, avoiding going to school as much as possible. God, I hated going to school. But yeah, just the normal teenage stuff. You know, I grew up right off of Melrose, right in, like, the heyday of Melrose, like that, I want to say, the late 80s, probably mid to late 80s, you know, there's that really, like, alternative kind of punk scene going on. So, it was fun. It was, it was, you know, I could leave the house for walking distance. There was restaurants and shops and all sorts of stuff to do. So, you know, it was, it was a good time. It was fortunate to be there in that, at that period of time. I think that the first time I actually saw Tony was towards, I want to say towards the end of that first year of school. I don't know. I just saw him in passing one day. I think I was between classes for some reason. I was going to do something. And I kind of saw him walking through like the quad area. And he caught my eye because he didn't look like anyone who'd gone to our school. I mean, you get used to, you know, you're at the end of the year. So you've gotten used to seeing everybody come and go pretty much at that point. Big guy, super long hair, almost like football kind of structure, because he's probably near 200 pounds, I think at the time, but just big smile, just had kind of a presence to him. So he definitely caught my eye. But I didn't talk to him for quite a bit. I don't remember exactly how it came to be. Like I know, because like I said, I lived right down the street. So I don't know. He must have at some point determined I lived really close. Because I'd start to see his friend's little Volkswagen like him and his friend driving by the house randomly back and forth. And then he ended up following my girlfriend and I. She used to live just down the street from me. And then at the beginning of that year, her family relocated over to Toluca Lake. So I know it was like a Friday. We were just heading to her house for the weekend kind of thing. And they ended up following us. And it was right there. There's a bridge right over the 101. I want to say it's all like the two Coinga sites connect right there somewhere. She stopped and she looked at me because they were behind us and there was really nobody else around. And she looked at me, she's like, are you going to go say something? And I'm like, no. I was a very shy, quiet kind of person. I was like, no, no, I'm good. And she's like, fine, I'll go. I was like, okay. So she gets out and she gave him my phone number. Then he actually got out handed me his info. Like, he wrote down his name, address, phone number, all that good stuff. And then we left. And I guess we went out to the movies. That's how we started, at least. And then, yeah, there was pretty much two years of inseparable. Like, he ended up moving in at one point, redecorating my entire room, painting, just took over. But that's him. That was how he was. I was, I'm a really mellow person. And he's just, he was a personality, you know. especially up in the hills, like off of Mulholland. So, you know, going up, relaxing at the view, listening to music, going to the beach. We've been to Big Bear. Everything was just real easy with us. We got along real well. Like his idea of celebration, let's say for like something like New Year's, which I remember we went to this bakery on Fairfax called Hanson's. This like thing to do would be like to get a chocolate chip cake. We'd go to Shakey's and get pizza and Mojo's. We'd sit and watch like this Godzilla marathon all day. So, you know, just silly stuff, really super silly stuff. this was um a couple of years after we had originally met so this is this is now 1990 that we're talking about um i recall being at home um in my room asleep and um i had woken up from something i know i'd gone back to sleep And that's when I started to have this really kind of odd, let's call it a nightmare. It wasn't a nightmare in a traditional form or something, you know, terrible was happening. I mean, the feeling of something terrible was happening. And there was something very, very chaotic, very upsetting. I couldn't necessarily see anything. Like I said, it was just, it was kind of dark and muddied and almost in a foggy way is the way the dream had come to me. And the only real visual I can recall in that darkness was just like chaos and like flashing lights. And that's really visually all I can remember other than that feeling of just panic and not sure what's going on. And I knew something wasn't right and something bad was happening. I just, I didn't know what it was. So I was startled awake by a phone call. And this is, you know, the house phone. This is the 90s. We didn't have cell phones. We didn't do that. We didn't even have pagers yet at this point, right? If you wanted to get in touch with someone, you're calling their house. That's how it was. And I remember answering the phone. And I'm startled awake, so I'm super confused right now. I'm like, I'm not sure what's going on. You know, I'm just getting my bearings of like, okay, I'm here.
