Slain Army veteran Maribel Ramos remembered at memorial service

Friends and family attended an emotional memorial in Santa Ana on Sunday for slain Army veteran and college student Maribel Ramos.

Ramos’ sister Marta Ortiz Ramos traveled to California to attend the service after the Mexican Consulate in Santa Ana requested that she be allowed to enter the United States, the family’s pastor said.

Ortiz Ramos did not have a visa or a passport and the consulate stepped in to help.

Maribel Ramos, a former U.S. Army sergeant, went missing from her apartment in Orange on May 2.

She was last seen in surveillance footage showing her dropping off a rent check at her apartment manager’s office. She was reported missing the next day, a Friday, after she failed to show up to commitments including a veterans event where she was scheduled to speak and at a long-standing softball game she played in with her cousin.

Her body was found two weeks later in some bushes near Santiago Canyon Ranch and Jackson Ranch Road after residents reported a foul odor in the area.

Ramos’ roommate, 54-year-old Kwang Choi Joy, was arrested in connection with her death and has since been charged with murder.

Prosecutors said Joy is accused of killing Ramos after getting into an argument with her when she told him to move out because he was not paying his rent.

In the days after her disappearance, Joy spoke to several television stations, saying that his property had been searched and that he had even volunteered his DNA. He said he missed his roommate.

“She’s my only family I have,” Joy told KNBC-TV. “I want her to come back, that’s all.”

Ramos was attending Cal State Fullerton at the time of her death.

On May 26, the university gave her family a posthumous degree in criminal justice on Ramos’ behalf.

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