Women Mourn Deaths of Their Mates Near Pier : Crime: The girlfriends of two shot in the head on Huntington Beach street find it difficult to make sense of the slayings. Both say the victims weren’t gang members, as police have suggested.

Robbie Sanchez and Kari Olson tenderly laid flowers Sunday on the sidewalk near where their boyfriends were gunned down last week. And they struggled to make sense of what happened.

“It’s very difficult and it hurts a lot for someone you love to be ripped away so quickly and senselessly,” said Olson, 19, an exotic dancer who lived with her boyfriend, Chen Cosmo Maui Blanchard.

Blanchard, 23, and Kenny Paul Sommer, 23, both of Huntington Beach, were shot to death Thursday after leaving a pizza parlor at the corner of Main Street and Orange Avenue, police said.

Police said a long-haired man with a goatee approached the two men and calmly shot them in the head at close range before fleeing on foot. A confrontation in a bar might have led to the attack, police said. No suspects have been arrested.

As the investigation continues, Olson and Sanchez are trying to find meaning in their lives.

“He was everything to me,” Sanchez said, sitting in a barren living room at the couple’s two-story apartment here. Outside in the driveway, her father and younger brother were loading boxes and furniture into a pickup truck.

“I can’t stay here because it hurts too much. I can still feel him and smell him here,” said Sanchez, 25, a hair stylist who was engaged to Sommer, a snake breeder. They had known each other for nearly six years.

Looking at a diamond ring on her left hand, Sanchez said they planned to be married in June, and then move to Oregon, somewhere to start a “Brady Bunch” family and escape the increasing violence in Southern California.

“I wish we had moved sooner,” Sanchez said.

Olson said she plans to remain in the apartment she shared with Blanchard. An unemployed auto mechanic, Blanchard was a loving man who spent as much time as possible with his 3-year-old son from a previous relationship, Olson said.

Olson said Blanchard always urged her to stay in school at Orange Coast College and pursue her dream of becoming a zoologist.

“For him, I have to keep going, even though it’s extremely painful. He’d be upset if I just quit,” she said.

Both Olson and Sanchez denied their boyfriends had belonged to gangs--a possibility raised by police--although both men had shaved their heads and wore tattoos.

“It’s so painful,” Olson said. “People are judging the exterior and don’t take time to understand the interior.”