Joy and the former General Hospital leading man had been friends for eight years. The night before the day he died, they had bartended together at Level 8 restaurant in downtown L.A. At the end of their shift, he walked Joy to her car. When they happened upon thieves messing with his car, “everything happened in an instant,” she said. “I’ve come to describe it as a glass of water that gets tipped over, and you’re scrambling to grab it and save it from spilling out completely, but it just runs through your fingertips and is gone.”

Wactor initially believed that his car was being towed. When it became clear that that wasn’t the case, he stepped in front of Joy to shield her from harm. “As I heard the shot ring into the night, he forcefully tumbled back into my arms,” she said, “and as I grabbed for him, I shouted, ‘Hunny, you OK?’ And he only responded, ‘Nope! Shot!’ We toppled onto the street where I pushed my legs under him and tried to hold his body up while screaming for help and screaming at him to stay with me.”

A security guard came running and performed CPR on Wactor. Unfortunately, the shot “was too close range, too extreme of a wound for him to survive it, but my god, he fought to stay,” Joy said. “My only peace is that I was with him and this didn’t happen to him alone. My only other peace will be seeing these awful men brought to justice.”