Susan Michele Spray understood the dangers of skydiving.
So much so that, before every jump, the 33-year-old aspiring writer from Huntington Beach left a note for her family in her bedroom that arranged her financial affairs -- even providing for the care of her cat, Daisy Mae -- in case the worst happened.
On March 5, as on many Saturdays, the novice skydiver leaped from a plane 12,500 feet over Perris Valley Skydiving in Riverside County.
It was her 55th jump, and her last.
Neither Spray's primary nor backup parachute deployed. A friend jumping alongside noticed Spray struggling to open her chute.
She landed half a mile north of the Perris drop zone and died on impact.
"If I'd known she was going to die that day skydiving, I probably couldn't have stopped her," said Aidan Hampson, 37, Spray's boyfriend of eight months.
Investigators at Perris Valley Skydiving are still trying to determine what went wrong. Riverside County sheriff's officials determined that Spray's death was an accident, although they are awaiting autopsy results.
To her family's surprise, the quiet, thoughtful Spray had thrown herself into skydiving about 18 months ago and graduated from the jump school at Perris, one of the nation's largest skydiving centers. The sport helped draw Spray, who was finishing her master's degree in technical writing at Cal State Long Beach, out of her shell, family and friends say.
"I really noticed a different Michele" after she started skydiving, said Spray's half-brother, Duane Wehus. "She was more talkative -- just happy."
Hampson also described Spray as "over the moon" about finally landing her dream job.
The day before she died, Spray and Hampson celebrated her new post as a technical writer for a heart catheter company.
Spray's death highlights the inherent risks of a sport many embrace for the adrenaline rush.
Skydivers cultivate an intimate knowledge of their gear and learn to manipulate their bodies so they can plunge through the sky with confidence. After Spray's death, master riggers at Perris Valley Skydiving examined both chutes and found nothing wrong; Spray had completed one jump that day.
"We try to check out everything we can to see if there's ... anything that we possibly could have done to prevent this, and everything was fine," said Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, general manager of the facility, where there are 150,000 jumps each year.
