Mother Says Oxnard Officer Died ‘Doing the Job He Loved to Do’ : Shooting: James E. O’Brien, gunned down in roadside battle, was always willing to serve even if it meant putting his life on the line, family members recall.

Although she will bury her son Tuesday, the mother of Oxnard Police Officer James E. O’Brien said Sunday that she has no regrets that her boy chose to be a police officer.

“He was doing the job he loved to do,” Patricia O’Brien said, flanked by family members during an interview at her Port Hueneme home. “It was none of my business to tell him how to run his life.”

Three days after the 35-year-old Oxnard police officer was killed in a roadside gun battle, family members said he was always willing to serve, even if it meant putting himself in the line of fire.

“My brother went the way he wanted to go,” said O’Brien’s older sister, Trish O’Brien. “He went down in a blaze of glory.”

Indeed, O’Brien seemed to sense keenly how suddenly his life could end, family members and friends said. Two months ago, he asked his priest to lunch. During the meal, the police officer made a serious request.

“He said to me, ‘If anything happens to me as a police officer, I want you to take care of it,’ ” said Father Liam Kidney of Padre Serra Parish in Camarillo. “I said, ‘Sure, but I’m probably going to die before you.’ Little did we know. . . .”

O’Brien’s mother also said her son seemed more intense than usual in the weeks preceding his death.

Having legally separated from his wife, O’Brien had been living at his mother’s house since earlier this year. His wife and two children, Kathryn, 9, and Sean, 7, remained at the family’s home in Camarillo’s Mission Oaks neighborhood.

In addition to working as an Oxnard police detective and spending time with his children, O’Brien had a black belt in karate and was a Civil War buff.

During the past year, he had gotten the bug to see some of the Civil War battlefields he had read about. So he drove across the country to visit famous battlegrounds in Virginia and elsewhere, his mother said.

“He was in a rush to get a lot done,” she said. “About two weeks ago, I said to him, ‘Jim, slow down. You’re driving me crazy. I mean, what’s the rush?’ But I guess the good Lord knew what the rush was for.”

O’Brien was also intent on having his children prepare for their first communion in the Catholic Church. Every Sunday morning, he would pick them up and take them to Padre Serra for communion classes.

“His kids were the most important thing,” said Serina O’Brien, the youngest of the officer’s three sisters.

O’Brien was interested not only in helping his own children but also the troubled youths he encountered during his work as an anti-graffiti detective, his mother said. His concern for children drew him to police work, she said.

Back when O’Brien was a student at Hueneme High, two of his friends were caught trying to rob a grocery store, his mother said.

“It shook him up,” she said. “He felt he wanted to help his friends who got into trouble and to help other people.”

He began as a reserve firefighter for Ventura County and then worked as a county sheriff’s deputy and traffic investigator for the Port Hueneme Police Department before joining the Oxnard police force in 1984.

“He tried them all and decided police was the one he wanted,” his mother said.

Although O’Brien said in an interview in 1992 that he had grown increasingly cautious over the years as the business of policing got more and more violent, he did not shy away from danger.

On Thursday, when the call went out for all available officers to respond to the rampage at the Oxnard unemployment office, O’Brien ran down the stairs from his second-floor office at the Oxnard police station, a clerk said.

“He always had to be where the action is,” Trish O’Brien said.