400 Attend Rites for Fatally Stabbed Boy

About 400 people attended memorial services Tuesday for 12-year-old Greg Anderson, who was stabbed to death last week in his East Tustin home.

Jon Waterson, youth director at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Tustin, where the services were held, remembered Greg as a boy who had “attacked life with a lot of vigor. He was kind of shy, but once he broke out of his shell, he really got to know everyone well,” Waterson said.

The Rev. Allan F. Waterson described Greg’s zeal for sports, especially baseball. Relaying a family story, Waterson told how Greg would wake up at 5:30 a.m. to get the baseball scores on television if he had missed them on the news the night before.

Friends said Greg was happiest when playing baseball. “He really went crazy when we played,” John Tisdale, 13, a fellow member of the church youth league, said after the service. “I liked it when he smiled because his ears would stick out, like my father’s.”

Friends described Greg, who would have been 13 Saturday, as a serious student who loved to go fishing and golfing with his father and enjoyed riding his bike.

Neighbors in the upper-middle-class East Tustin area described the killing as a shock. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department continued its investigation Tuesday, and the house was still cordoned off, with the Anderson family not permitted to move back in.

Greg’s 15-year-old sister, Carly, discovered his body at 3 p.m. Thursday when she returned home from school. The boy had ridden his bike home from nearby Hewes Middle School at 2:30 p.m.

Waterson said the Andersons’ tragedy “hit too close to home” for many people. “It could be your story,” he said to the crowd. “That’s what is so frightening.”