Mother Tried in Vain to Save Her Son

From the second Gail Shirley saw her son crumpled in a doorway of their Montalvo home, bleeding from wounds to his neck, arm and ribs, she knew he was in a fight for his life.

“Oh God, I’ve been stabbed,” were the last words Jake said to his mother.

Without thinking, Shirley dropped to her knees and started applying pressure to knife wounds that would prove fatal.

A Ventura police officer soon arrived, and side-by-side they performed CPR on the 16-year-old Buena High student, who hours earlier had received his learner’s permit to drive.

They continued to work on him until paramedics wheeled him away.

“I was trying to save my baby,” Shirley said Wednesday, biting her bottom lip to fight back tears.

It’s not supposed to happen this way. Parents are not supposed to bury their children. But in a few days, that is what Bob and Gail Shirley will do.

In a struggle that Gail Shirley did not see or hear, her only child was stabbed to death at lunchtime Tuesday by an intruder who bolted out the front door and vanished into their neighborhood.

The death of any child is tough. But it’s made harder when a young life is snuffed out just as it is hitting its stride.

James “Jake” Bush was blossoming into a fine young man, a lanky youngster who had just landed his first job at a Ventura movie theater and who was thrilled to have been picked as co-captain of Buena’s track squad next season.

He was excited about his senior year, primed to take advanced placement calculus and computer programming classes. He would have turned 17 on July 30 and was just starting to think about college.

He was just coming into his own, excelling in so many areas and showing great promise to do so much more. Bob Shirley, his stepfather, liked to call him a budding Renaissance man.

“All the pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together for him,” said Gail Shirley, who like her husband teaches at Balboa Middle School in east Ventura.

“I am not in denial, nor do I have any delusions about what happened to us yesterday,” she continued. “My son was taken from me. He was the center of my universe, my one and only. No family anywhere ever, ever deserves this kind of tragedy.”

*

Jake, who finished the 11th grade earlier this month, was off to a great summer.

On Monday, he had treated his parents to a showing of “The Lost World” at the theater where he worked, exploding in laughter when leaping dinosaurs made them jump out of their seats.

And on Tuesday, he spent the morning with his mom. They drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Santa Paula where Jake passed the written exam so he could learn to drive.

Later, they stopped by a produce stand where they bought five cantaloupes, Jake’s favorite. They went shopping for plumbing fixtures at a local discount house because they planned to fix up Jake’s bathroom this summer. They bought a couple of hot dogs and got home shortly after noon.

It didn’t take long to figure out the house had been burglarized. A bedroom door usually propped open had swung halfway shut. And the screen on Jake’s bedroom window had been pried off and his television had been moved.

*

Shirley grabbed the phone and called 911. A dispatcher asked if the burglar was still in the house. Until that moment, she hadn’t even thought about it.

They split up to search the house. Carrying a cordless phone, Shirley headed to one end of the house. Jake took the back of the house, eventually stepping into the den.

That’s where it happened. The only thing Shirley heard was the slamming of the front door. And as she wheeled around, she saw Jake staggering in a doorway.

In that instant, Shirley knew it was bad. Still on the phone, she told the dispatcher to send help. She ran to cradle her boy, sweeping him up in her arms and begging him to stay alive.

“We had been in there four or five minutes. We had no idea anybody was still in there,” Shirley said. “I got him rolled over and he started to slip away. I had a pretty good idea that my kid was in trouble.”

Jake died about three hours later on the operating table at Ventura County Medical Center. Bob and Gail Shirley were together when they got the news. They held hands and wept.

Now they hold onto their memories.

Gail Shirley remembers how Jake would finish cross-country races in an all-out sprint, the determination etched on his face. Bob Shirley, married to Gail for six years, remembers how his stepson would call him Dad.

They remember how he tried harder than anyone on the track, often putting in late hours and showing up on weekends to work on the triple jump. They remember how as a junior, he finished at the top of the class in senior physics and calculus.

And they remember his kindness, how he would help anyone in need. How he was all smiles. How he was a good kid who didn’t deserve to die.

“We were so proud of him,” Bob Shirley said.

“He knew,” Gail Shirley said. “I think he really knew.”