The fatal stabbing of 49-year-old Milpitas resident Yu Ju "Amy" Fan inside her Aspenridge Drive home remains an unsolved homicide case, seven months after it changed the lives of many north Milpitas residents.

Fan's brutal 2007 murder shocked homeowners in the quiet clustered subdivision of two-story Mediterranean-style houses located off Milmont Drive, south of Dixon Landing Road.

"A lot of families used to let their children play on the streets here," Ana Jimenez, a three-year Aspenridge Drive resident, said of the life-changing event that occurred just doors down from her home. "When that happened, it was like a desert; nobody would walk the streets. Something like that just shakes everybody up."

Jimenez, whose 17-year-old stepson attends Milpitas High School, said the murder altered her own family's routine.

"He would walk to school; afterward I started to drive him," she said.

Fan's murder the first homicide in Milpitas since December 2005 is still an apparent mystery as to the identity of the suspect, and to the motive for the crime. Milpitas police say they have no new leads in the case.

On Oct. 1, 2007 at about 6 p.m., police received a call regarding Fan, an accountant at Exar Corp. in Fremont, who had not shown up for work.

That night, officers responded to Fan's residence at 359 Aspenridge Drive an end unit located near a drainage canal not far from Dixon Landing Park.

Arriving officers searched the house and found Fan deceased

inside a master bedroom. The incident was soon ruled a homicide.

During the investigation at the home, police impounded a car as a search for additional evidence.

Neighbors in the normally quiet Dixon Landing Road-area neighborhood said Fan's garage door was open until after midnight Sept. 29, which was atypical.

Friends confirmed Fan lived alone, and had been putting a daughter through college at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Within a week's time, information about a "person of interest" in the homicide case surfaced. Police would disclose that on the same night Fan was murdered, at about 11 p.m., a surveillance camera at a Shell Gas station located at 2180 Monterey Highway in San Jose captured the image of a man allegedly using the victim's credit card.

Police said the man used Fan's credit card in San Jose, Union City and other locations.

Soon after, the man contacted Milpitas police after he saw himself in a news report on television and he was later questioned. But investigators never named the man or anyone else in the case as a murder suspect.

Despite hundreds of man-hours spent investigating the Fan murder, Milpitas police Sgt. Matt Toffey suggested this case has been difficult, in part because the overloaded Santa Clara County Crime Lab is still processing crime scene evidence from the murder.

"They've been working on it since the case started," said Toffey, the primary detective in this investigation.

And he added a multitude of evidence still needs to be processed by the lab. In the meantime, Toffey said he's spent a great deal of time piecing together other evidence in the case.

"I've been building information," he said. "Almost never a day goes by that I'm not working on this."

Toffey, who has investigated other homicides, said this case has been hard.

"By virtue of the fact that I didn't name a suspect, it has been difficult," he said, adding that he would not discuss a possible motive for Fan's death.

With regard to the "person of interest" who had been interviewed by police, Toffey said that man is no longer part of the police investigation. And to the use of Fan's credit cards after her murder, Toffey said the unidentified man told police he found the credit cards discarded.

Milpitas Police Department has spent approximately $19,000 in overtime and related costs to investigate the Fan murder. A double homicide in 2005 cost the city upward of $30,000 in overtime, Police Chief Dennis Graham said.

Since the incident, Aspenridge Drive residents have endeavored to get to know each other. Last October, after the murder, residents Michael and Soon Kim organized a neighborhood block party.

On Sunday, they organized the second neighborhood get-together.

According to Jimenez, the two events have not necessarily been a memorial to remember Fan.

"It's not quite a memorial," she said. "None of us, the whole neighborhood, (knew) this lady. That's what's kind of prompting us to have this block party so that we all know each other."

Jimenez said families gathered on Sunday afternoon over food and even sang songs. She added about 80 people showed as Jimenez's husband, Jose, barbecued.

The block parties, she added, are ways to gather names and telephone numbers from neighbors, and to get to know the neighborhood children.

"We're going to put together a phone list for everybody in the neighborhood to have," she said.

Jimenez, who has been an unofficial spokesperson for her mostly non-English speaking Asian neighbors, said Aspenridge Drive residents are now closer than they've ever been in her time living there.

"We really want to make sure we know all of our neighbors," she said.