Mourners Pay Tribute to Four Victims of Storms

Funerals were held Monday for four victims of last week’s record rains--a pregnant woman, her full-term fetus, and her fiance, all killed when a mudslide pushed boulders through the bedroom wall of their Ventura County home--and a Woodland Hills teen who drowned in the flood-swollen Los Angeles River.

More than 800 people attended a memorial service for 15-year-old Adam Bischoff, a high school sophomore who was remembered as a star athlete, a caring little brother and a fun-loving--and sometimes mischievous--friend who loved to rollerblade and surf but also took time to help neighborhood children fill their Easter baskets.

Adam slipped into the swift waters of a flood control channel on Wednesday morning after he and a companion apparently rode their bicycles through a hole in a nearby fence. His 10-mile journey down the raging river and the futile attempts to save him were widely broadcast on television and documented in newspapers, drawing people across the nation and around the world into the story.

It was standing room only inside the small Prince of Peace Episcopal Church, with hundreds of mourners left to sit outside, beneath a hill turned neon green by the same historic rainfall that took Adam’s life.

Meanwhile, in Ojai, 500 people attended a funeral at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church for Michele (Shelly) Bovee, 27, her fiance, Glenn Queen, 30, and Wesley, the child they were expecting, who died inside his mother’s womb a week before his expected birth. They were killed after a wall of mud smothered them while they were sleeping.

Wesley was cradled in Bovee’s arms in her casket. Coroners officials had extracted the unborn child during an autopsy.

Bovee’s heartbreak a year earlier, when another baby was stillborn, was reflected on some of the notes attached to wreaths and sprays of flowers. One read: “For Shelly and sons.”

“She was our sunshine,” said friend Sharon Fry, whose family home in Oak View is six blocks away from the house where Bovee grew up. “Sunshine, that was her song.”

Bovee’s sister said that Bovee, a clerk for the Ventura County tax collector, taught the “You Are My Sunshine” song to every child she knew, just as her mother had taught her the song when she was young.

Queen’s friends described the flooring contractor as enthusiastic, an “encourager,” one who was always there to help when he was needed.

Queen’s 3-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Whitney Ashley Queen, arrived at her father’s funeral holding onto her grandmother with one hand and clutching a bouquet of red roses with the other.

Janet Bracken, the child’s maternal grandmother, said Whitney does not realize how close she had come to losing her own life. She had been with her father and Bovee at their home north of Ventura the night before Wednesday’s mudslide.

Often, the little girl would stay an extra night with her father before he returned Whitney to her mother’s home in Granada Hills. But Queen’s mother had insisted that he return his daughter home last Tuesday, as scheduled.

“If she hadn’t insisted, my little granddaughter would have been with them,” said Bracken. “We would have three caskets here today.”

At Bischoff’s funeral, his sister Carrie recounted fond memories ranging from a trip they took to Europe one summer to buying Christmas presents for their parents this year. “I ache at the thought that we can’t have new memories of you at 18, 20, 30 and even 40,” she said.

Photographs displayed on bulletin boards outside the church depicted Adam growing from a pink-faced infant to a handsome and athletic teen-ager.

Miller reported from Ojai and Pyle from Woodland Hills.