Stacy Chapin knows her late son Ethan Chapin isn’t alone.
A year and a half after the 20-year-old, his girlfriend Xana Kernodle, 20, and their fellow University of Idaho students Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were murdered while sleeping at a Moscow, Idaho, house, Stacy likes to think that wherever Ethan is today, he’s with someone who loved him.
“I’m not sure where he is,” she told Tay and Taylor Lautner during her appearance on the June 5 episode of The Squeeze podcast. “He’s up in Heaven somewhere, he’s happy. We’re glad Xana is with him.”
“We were fortunate to spend a summer with Xana,” Stacy continued, while noting the family has made it a policy not to speak of the other students publicly—much as they wouldn’t want others to speak about Ethan—though she did add, “She was beautiful. Whatever makes you comfortable in the process, so the fact that they’re together, that’s wonderful.”
Stacy—who is also mom to surviving triplets Maizie and Hunter—went on to explain how she and her husband Jim recently learned they’d each separately found the same way of honoring Ethan.