Victim ‘Always Had a Smile on Her Face’

Jennifer Myrick embraced life as only a young woman in love can. But death seemed to stalk her over the past year and finally caught up with her Monday on a sidewalk outside a Paso Robles dress shop.

The year was rounding out as the best of her life. She recently fell in love, moved out of her parents’ house, got engaged. There were college plans, the new white Mustang her dad bought her, the diamond ring.

Yet in hindsight, Myrick’s final months reveal tragedy was close by, nipping at her heels. Her beloved cat died and she took it like the loss of a child. She had barely survived a horrific traffic accident in the summer.

Ironically, the collision led her to take the new job at the dress shop where she was crushed to death in a cascade of bricks just three days before Christmas and four days after her 20th birthday.

“They were a beautiful couple,” said Joan Kitzmiller, who lived next to the bungalow in Atascadero that Jennifer rented with her fiance, Greg Klingman.

“You could see they were in love. They were so young. It’s just heartbreaking.”

Death in youth is difficult enough to accept, much less during the holidays, but in Jennifer’s case, it was simply beyond comprehension to the people who knew her. And they were many.

“She was very popular. She was always doing something, always active, always volunteering for stuff,” said Carlos Victoria, safety coordinator for King City High School, from which Myrick graduated in 2002. “She always had a smile on her face, always had something nice to say, a real good kid.”

The Myrick family lives in a big yellow house with a green roof and a white picket fence and a wishing well in the frontyard. This is where Jennifer grew up. It is a neighborhood of stately homes with land and fences to keep horses in. It is the hill country where John Steinbeck grew up and wrote books. In the Salinas Valley below, farmers tend their fields.

Bryan Myrick, her older brother, recalled not getting along well with Jennifer as a child. He was into punk rock and rebellion. She was involved with the high school drama troupe and jazz band, and regularly attended an Assemblies of God church.

“She was so popular, even her teachers from elementary school came by today to pay their respects,” said Bryan, standing on the porch of the family house as raindrops fell.

Her best friend in high school was Christine Parker; the two went on family vacations and trips with the Parker family. Sometimes Jennifer showed up with blond hair, sometimes red, sometimes brown. But she always had a smile.

“She was like my second daughter,” recalled Lonnie Parker. “She had very high spirits and was full of life. She always used to come down the stairs, swinging her arms and legs out, acting out different people. She wanted to be an actress.”

After high school, Myrick worked at a variety of retail jobs in Central California, mostly at the local outlet stores and then as a receptionist at the L’Image Salon and Spa in Atascadero. Diana Bauer, her boss at the local Jones New York store, said Myrick was considering returning to college to get a marketing degree.

“I called her my little bubbly,” Bauer said.

Greg Klingman, 22, first got to know Jennifer Myrick when they were teenagers, starting with an Internet chat with her seven years ago. He lived in Honolulu at the time, and they became long-distance pen pals, then friends, then met for the first time in Seattle when he moved to the mainland to work for Starbucks. He bought her a watch and the romance was in full swing.

“We both knew we wanted to be together,” he said. “We liked each other a lot. We were all flirty. It was fairly adventurous.”

They moved in together and Klingman proposed to her late last year, getting down on one knee while offering a bouquet of orange and red-tipped roses, her favorite. They drove to Santa Maria and bought an engagement ring, but it was too big. Bauer warned Jennifer to be careful it did not slip off her finger when the couple went to Hawaii earlier this year to meet Klingman’s mother.

Then, in July, after an evening at the Myricks’ home in the hills, Jennifer was driving her new Mustang, with Klingman in the passenger seat, when a drunk driver traveling at nearly 100 mph crossed the center divider on U.S. 101 and struck her car head-on. The Mustang spun out and was smacked by two other cars.

“When we hit, I just turned to her and told her, ‘I love you’ over and over again until the car stopped. The highway patrolman was surprised we weren’t killed,” Klingman said.

Myrick’s right ankle was shattered and a steel rod was surgically inserted. She started a painful recovery and rehabilitation that forced her to quit her job at the hair salon. Three months later, she was back on her feet, dancing and showing people how well her ankle had heeled. That’s when she started looking for a new job. She was hired at Ann’s Dress Shop, on Park Street in Paso Robles, about three weeks ago.

Like many small California towns, downtown Paso Robles is a quaint assortment of old, historic structures, many built not long after the Gold Rush. They make for charming boutiques and coffee shops, but many were built before modern building codes and use unreinforced masonry.

Klingman was at home in bed when the magnitude 6.5 temblor struck the Central Coast at 11:15 a.m. Monday. It was the biggest quake in the area in recorded history, and as it rocked he was surprised that everything in the bedroom teetered and swayed but did not fall, save for one item: A framed picture of Jennifer hung above the bed. It landed in his lap. He thought it strange, but didn’t worry.

“She kissed me goodbye in the morning when she went to work and said she was going to work a short shift and would be home early,” Klingman recalled.

Not long after the shaking stopped, a friend came to Klingman’s house and told him a building had collapsed on Park Street. Jennifer was not accounted for.

Klingman said that when he arrived at the scene, the Myricks were already there and he screamed from behind the police yellow tape, “Jennifer! Jennifer!” Only dust and debris littered the street outside the shop. The entire second floor of the 116-year-old Mastagni building had collapsed.

The coroner pulled the family aside and told them rescue personnel believed they might have found Myrick. The body of a young woman was found along with that of 55-year-old Marilyn Zafuto of Paso Robles.

From an emergency command center, the coroner picked up two items taken from the young victim and showed them to Klingman. One was the watch he had bought her in Seattle when they first met.

“Then he showed me the ring,” he said, “just crushed with brick.”