FULLERTON – Four people associated with Saturday’s triple homicide in Fullerton were involved in the Southern California furry community, a group of fans who congregate online, at meetups and at conventions to admire and dress up like animals, a member said.
“A lot of people in our community were devastated,” said Christopher Parque-Johnson, 23, of Garden Grove, an artist, performer and videographer for the SoCal Furs, which has members from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. “I’ve been hearing from a lot of people. It bothered everybody.
“It makes no sense.”
Parque-Johnson led a group of furries, as they call themselves, to the site of the homicides Sunday night. They laid roses, left cards and lit candles to honor victim Jennifer Yost, Parque-Johnson said, because she was a mother figure to the SoCal Furs. The two men accused in the killings are also furries, as is Yost’s daughter Katlynn Goodwin Yost, Parque-Johnson said.
“All of them were always nice to everybody,” said Parque-Johnson, known in the furry community as Bandit, a raccoon inspired by the film “Over the Hedge.”
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office, as early as today, will determine whether to file murder charges against two men and a 17-year-old female accused in the triple homicide.
Christopher Yost, 34; his wife, Jennifer Yost, 39; and their friend Arthur Boucher, 28, were found dead in the Yost home in Fullerton on Saturday morning. Two of the couple’s daughters, ages 6 and 9, were home when police arrived. The younger girl alerted police by calling 911, saying their parents had died.
On Sunday morning, police arrested Frank Felix, 25, of Sun Valley; Joshua Acosta, a 21-year-old U.S. Army mechanic based at Fort Irwin; and a 17-year-old female on suspicion of murder.
The trio were arrested after police had asked for the public’s help in finding Jennifer Yost’s missing daughter, Katlynn, who is 17.
Katlynn Yost was located, but police said state law prevents them from saying whether she was the arrested teenager.
Fullerton police on Monday released the official booking charges for the three: murder and conspiracy. The Fullerton Police Department declined to comment further on the case Monday.
The District Attorney’s Office will decide whether to directly charge the 17-year-old as an adult or take her case to juvenile court, where a judge would decide if the teenager is appropriate for adult court.
Parque-Johnson said he knew the two men and Katlynn Yost, who identifies herself as a furry on her Facebook and Twitter accounts, but did not associate them with one another.
“We’ve never seen them huddled together,” Parque-Johnson said. “We didn’t know them as friends of each other.”
Parque-Johnson said he was closest with Jennifer Yost.
“People looked up to her,” he said. “A lot of people cared about her.”
Joshua Acosta and Frank Felix were helpful in setting up and breaking down weekend events, Parque-Johnson said.
“They were trying to be outstanding citizens,” Parque-Johnson said.
A friend of Jennifer Yost’s, Melinda Giles, said she became friends with her after meeting her and her daughter last year at a gathering of furries.
She said she also saw Felix and Acosta at furry events, and had met Felix at the Yost family home.
She said Jennifer Yost told her several weeks ago that she had forbidden Felix from seeing her daughter.
“To protect her daughter, Chris and Jenn were like, ‘We don’t want you to be friends with our daughter anymore,“’ Giles said Monday, adding that the couple was warm, generous and recently helped her move into her new home. “It is really sad because they didn’t deserve that. Those little girls didn’t deserve to wake up to dead parents.”
Boucher was staying with the Yosts at the time of the killings.
Goodwill Yost is a high school senior and member of the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Her social media pages show she is active in the furry community, where she was known as “Daydreamer,” and many photos are posted.
She is seen wearing her military uniform in one, and others show a gray fox-wolf costume.
Felix is from Sun Valley, Ca.
Acosta has been assigned to Fort Irwin, Ca., since last October, said Wayne V. Hall, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. Acosta entered the service in March 2015 and previously was assigned to Fort Lee, Virginia, and Fort Jackson, S.C.
Furries have been around since the 1980s. They admire anthropomorphic animals – characters that walk on two feet and speak like humans. Most of them are “non-suiters,” meaning they don’t spend $1,000 to $5,000 or more on full-body animal costumes. Instead, they create characters and wear badges with their characters displayed.
Parque-Johnson said furries have been unfairly characterized in the media as a group of sexual deviants. Sexual activity involving some people in furry costumes has happened in the three-decade history of the furries, according to media accounts.
“If we see it, we don’t allow those people back,” Parque-Johnson said. “We feel that behavior would be very inappropriate in our group. We think that is very weird.”
The furry community comprises mostly adults under 30, although there are some older furries who were fans of Disney movies involving animals with human characteristics such as in “Robin Hood.”
Furries watch movies, play video games, draw pictures and trade cards, Parque-Johnson said.
“People come to us to get away from the negative stuff in life,” he said.
Associated Press contributed to this story.
Contact the writer: ksharon@ocregister.com
