“All we know is there was yelling and then violence,” Golan said. “It does make you wonder, how could this have been prevented?”

Neighbors said they could hear a commotion coming from the couple’s apartment in the middle of the night.

Jody and Richard Berglund’s 26-year-old daughter awoke around 3:40 a.m. Monday to the sound of a child and woman screaming in the apartment next door. When she left for work hours later, she saw the neighbor’s apartment door wide open. There was blood on the floor of the hallway and blood streaked in the elevator.

She was so shocked that she did not go right back to her family’s apartment but took the elevator downstairs, got in her car and called her parents. “You gotta go check. Something bad has happened here,” she told her father on the phone.

Berglund, 61, looked into the neighboring unit. Inside, he said, he saw legs sticking out from the kitchen — and blood everywhere.

“The apartment was in disarray. Everything was knocked over,” he told the Times on Tuesday.

He called 911, and paramedics told him to check on the man. He stepped over the puddles of blood to walk into the kitchen and found his neighbor face down, wearing only socks and underwear. He was dead, Berglund said.

The Berglunds described the family who lived in the apartment as “very private people.” They saw the neighbors only occasionally, such as when Chaney took the 9-year-old to school. She was always well dressed and didn’t have any signs of visible abuse, Berglund said.

“We’re all pretty shook up. You don’t expect that next door,” said Jody Berglund.

A law enforcement source told the Times that Chaney and Johnson lived together for more than three years but were not married. Chaney served in the Air Force as recently as 2020, according to the source.

National Archives and Records Administration photographs indicate that Chaney served as an armament technician in the 31st Munitions Squadron and was stationed in Italy for a period during his service.

Raul Macariegos, 37, who lives on the first floor of the apartment complex, said he knew the family who lived in the unit. Macariegos’ daughter often played with the couple’s older daughter by the pool, he said. The parents were quiet — the type who say hello in passing, but don’t stop to strike up a conversation, he said.

The whole situation was shocking, he said, but he struggled to fathom why the girls were left on the side of the freeway.

“I don’t see how anyone could do that,” Macariegos said.

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(Los Angeles Times staff writers Jack Dolan and Caroline Petrow-Cohen contributed to this report.)

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