She made sure her husband was blindfolded. A family member had taken him to lunch earlier in the day on Saturday. Valencia resident Juan Lopez later said he had no idea what his wife was doing.
She opened the garage to their home, the blindfold was removed, and around 30 people greeted Lopez with the surprise. It wasn’t his birthday. According to his wife, Yuli Beatty-Lopez, it was about paying tribute to her husband and showing him how much he meant to her.
“I’m honoring my husband for what he so deserves,” Beatty-Lopez said upon Lopez seeing the surprise in their garage. “No one knows the struggles of PTSD and being in Iraq except for you and, of course, your wife, who deals with it every day. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the man that you are. And thank you for being my best friend.”
She had tears in her eyes. The two hugged and kissed.
For about the past two months, Beatty-Lopez had been at work remodeling the garage. Her husband knew people were coming over to redo, for example, the floor, but he had no idea what else his wife had been up to. She wouldn’t let him inside. And he didn’t think anything of it because, between his job as lead campus supervisor at West Ranch High School in Stevenson Ranch and coaching baseball, he’s been constantly busy.
Beatty-Lopez did so much more than just clean out the garage, which she said was a total mess. She “gutted it” and turned it into a place to honor her husband for his service as a United States Marine.
The floor she had redone included the U.S. Marine Corps emblem and insignia stamped in the center of the space. On the walls, which were painted and striped with Marine Corps colors, were pictures of Lopez from his days in the Marines, letters from the Marines, framed newspaper articles about him, U.S. and Marine Corps flags, Lopez’s uniform with pins and dog tags in a shadow box, plaques, statues and other items related to the Marines.
Lopez’s brothers, who also served in the Marines, had their pictures on one of the walls.
On the back wall of the garage was a mural of the Feb. 23, 1945, Marine Corps flag-raising at Iwo Jima. West Ranch students painted the mural earlier in the week.
Beatty-Lopez, who’s the bilingual assistant principal’s secretary at West Ranch, discovered a group of art students at school and asked if they’d be interested in painting something in the garage.
According to West Ranch junior Savannah Tisckos, one of the students in the group, she’d never met Beatty-Lopez before. Beatty-Lopez evidently found the group through their art teacher.
“She asked us last Friday,” Tisckos said during a telephone interview before the surprise. “We came to her house on Sunday, and we kind of like sketched it all out. And then pretty much we worked from Monday to Wednesday, and Thursday we just really cleaned it up.”
The other students to take part in the mural included West Ranch juniors Mica Peralta and Audra Leiva, and West Ranch seniors Elizabeth Lee and Priscilla Kim.
At the surprise gathering on Saturday afternoon in the garage, Lopez’s dad came from Palmdale. Co-workers from West Ranch, along with friends and other family members, also showed up to be part of the celebration.
A West Ranch Marine recruiter, Sgt. Felix Roldan, was there. He was quite impressed with the garage, saying it was like a museum and certainly “cooler than our recruiting station.”
Before the big reveal, those who were in on the secret had gathered inside the garage and were eagerly waiting for Lopez to arrive.
Kylee Welch, who said she works at the after-school program that the couple’s daughter attends, actually seemed a little nervous. Maybe “anxious” was the better word to describe her behavior — she asked if they were all supposed to yell out surprise, and when she heard Beatty-Lopez shout out that “The Eagle is landing” from the other side of the garage door, her nerves showed.
The light chatter in the garage died down. Someone opened and closed a door from what sounded like a vehicle out in the street. And then everyone waited for the voices of Beatty-Lopez and her husband to come closer.
“I had no idea,” Lopez said in an interview after the surprise. “This shows that what I’ve done hasn’t gone overlooked. This is more than I could ever ask for. If I had just one corner for this stuff, I’d be fine with it.”
He added that his Marines mementos had previously been in boxes. Seeing it all on display in the garage was beyond anything he ever could’ve imagined.
He spoke about his experiences in the Marines. He’d served between 2000 and 2004.
Lopez shared a letter that was on the wall from a lieutenant colonel, detailing some heroics Lopez had displayed in early 2003 while overseas and serving as light-duty armored vehicle gunner. He’d destroyed two technical vehicles and neutralized numerous dismounts, aiding in the company gaining fire superiority over the ambushing force.
Lopez seemed to truly appreciate all the effort that went into transforming the garage, walking through it slowly and taking in every detail. Beatty-Lopez said her husband’s reaction to the surprise exceeded her expectations.
The couple met at West Ranch over a dozen years ago. According to Beatty-Lopez, they became best friends. They got married on Nov. 10, 2024, which was the Marine Corps’ 249th birthday, and they bought their home in Valencia in December.
After the surprise, everyone who was present that afternoon enjoyed each other’s company, food and drinks. Beatty-Lopez said it was a special day to be together.
“My kids, my grandkids, everybody — we’re just all like a happy family,” she said. “I told these girls — after they did the mural — ‘You guys are a part of our family now.’”
Throughout the afternoon, that’s exactly what it seemed like — family going in and out of the house, chatting with each other, sharing memories and creating new ones.
