Specter of Her Sister’s Murder Is Vivid Still

FULLERTON —  Most days, at precisely 4:20 a.m., Anya Mikasobe is awakened by the memory of her sister.

The image is as clear and as horrifying as the November morning when she watched as her brother-in-law walked into her Fullerton apartment and fatally shot her 29-year-old sister, Norma Ofiu, twice at point-blank range.

It has been more than two months since Norma was murdered by her husband, Lopeti Siliva Ofiu, 26, who fled only to take his own life hours later in a Buena Park hotel room. But Mikasobe says the frenzied events that began at precisely 4:20 a.m. on Nov. 17 are constantly replayed in her head and in the nightmares of her 13-year-old daughter, who was awakened that morning to the sight of her aunt’s bloody body on the floor.

The incident’s long-term effects are just now becoming clear for the family: Norma Ofiu’s three young children, now in the care of another aunt, are struggling to understand the loss of both parents; plagued by waves of almost debilitating guilt, Mikasobe and her daughter are in the care of a psychiatrist, and it was just two weeks ago that Mikasobe was able to return to work.

“I still have thoughts about what I could have done,” she said. “Unless I had a gun, if I had a gun, I could have shot him. But what good would that have done? He was killed anyway, and I would have ended up in jail.”

Norma Ofiu, a fun-loving hula dancer who worked as a Disneyland secretary, was in the midst of a two-month separation from her husband of five years when she decided to spend the night with Mikasobe in Fullerton, after the two had enjoyed a long night out, Mikasobe said.

“We had so much fun that night,” she said. “Every time we got together, we had so much fun.”

Now, Mikasobe said, she is awakened most mornings at the same moment Norma began rousing her early that fatal morning, alerting her to the sound of loud pounding on the front door.

Mikasobe remembers that when the pounding ceased, the first shot was fired and the sight of Lopeti Ofiu, 26, as he delivered the second shot from just two feet away, standing over his fallen wife.

After he shot her sister, Mikasobe said, Ofiu turned the gun toward her, and she jumped back in fear. She said her brother-in-law may have spared her and decided to flee after seeing Mikasobe’s young daughter enter the room.

“I felt really helpless and mad that I didn’t go charging out the door after him,” she said, describing the guilt she sometimes still feels. “I heard that shot, and it stopped me. I always thought that if anyone did anything to my sister I would charge after them. The counselor made me realize that it was a natural reaction. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I should have been the one to save her.’ ”

These days, Mikasobe said, her sister’s children, two boys ages 3 and 4, and a girl, 8, are confused. She said the oldest probably will need psychiatric care.

When Norma Ofiu’s body was taken to the family’s native Hawaii for burial Jan. 2, Mikasobe said the children, while on their way to services there, thought they were going to a restaurant. When they arrived for the open-casket viewing, she said, the youngest boy nudged his mother’s body as if trying to wake her up from a deep sleep.

“So many things go through my mind,” Mikasobe said.

A chief concern is to find another place to live.

She said she has remained in the same apartment, partly out of anxiety, feeling that her departure would somehow mean that she was abandoning her sister’s spirit. “I know that sounds odd, but I felt like she was still there.”