She has gone to the corner, to the bus-stop bench, at least twice a week since it happened. Late last week she went again, this time bearing a sign.
“What coward killed my son?” it reads. Below that is her cellphone number. At the bottom she signed it: “Mom.”
She was not what I had expected. She lives by herself now on a neatly tended, tree-lined street in Englewood. She greeted me at the front door, her eyes overflowing with sorrow behind the thick eyeglass frames she wears.
Patty Rush is a tiny, almost delicate woman with short, auburn hair. I spoke her name half-quizzically, making sure I was in the right home. She nodded.
He was on his way home from a club downtown after watching a Nuggets playoff game when the shooting happened. Her son lay at that bus stop dead for likely three hours before anyone noticed.
A couple of kids riding their bikes at 5:30 the morning of May 31 discovered the body of Ivory Jay Meffords, 28, at the intersection of East 31st Avenue and Franklin Street. Some had thought him just a bum sleeping on the street.
He had been shot multiple times.
Patty Rush, 51, is seeking answers she knows likely will never come. Detectives have revealed little, she said. Four other people were killed in the streets that weekend.
She knows they are overworked. It is why she posted her sign.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. She tried to raise him right after his father chose drugs over them when Ivory was just 2. And he was a good kid until sophomore year at South High School.
She’d put him in Catholic elementary school. He was a Boy Scout, Patty Rush explained.
At age 15, it all fell apart. First, he and some buddies grabbed a jacket, ran from Foley’s department store, were caught and jailed.
“I would put him on the bus to South High, but he would never go to school,” she recalled. “People always thought I was too strict a mother, but that’s what I felt I had to do.”
She lost him, she said. He would spend all of his time with his friends on the east side of town. And finally, at age 18, he and some friends robbed a group of kids.
“They found a gun in the car,” Patty Rush said softly. “They called it aggravated robbery. Ivory was the one who went to prison. Worst time of my life until now.”
He would drift in and out of jail. He would always violate parole.
“A five-year sentence became nearly 10 years,” she said.
He had been out for nearly a year, and finished with parole, when he died, she said.
Flowers and other mementos still dot the corner.
“Females,” his mother said. Ivory Meffords in the pictures I saw was a handsome man. The only thing the police returned to her, she said, was lip balm and the headband he used to tie his hair.
“Was he a bad kid?” Patty Rush repeats. “No, he lost his hope. He couldn’t get a job. He had no hope left.”
It is almost time for her to report to the housekeeping job she has held for 10 years. She will stop once more on the corner where her only son died, something she feels she needs to do.
“I want to give a message to every mother of every gang member that this is a total waste of life,” Patty Rush said. “There is a better way. There has to be one.”
I had one last question.
“No,” she said firmly. Her cellphone has yet to ring.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
