The family of Joshua Jeffries asks your help in solving this crime.
On Friday, August 10, 2001 at about 4:30 AM, 11-year-old JOSHUA MICHAEL JEFFRIES died as a result of a gunshot wound, while he was asleep in his bedroom at 6548 S.E. 48th Ave., in the City of Portland, Oregon. The unknown suspect apparently entered the home through an unlocked back door.
JOSHUA JEFFRIES had attended Lewis Elementary School and would have been attending Sellwood Middle School in the fall.
There is a cash reward offered for information reported to the Cold Case Homicide Unit that leads to an arrest in this case [Portland Police].
It was before dawn on a balmy summer morning, and the back of the house was lighted in an eerie glow.
Someone used the dim light to slip silently, like an apparition, into the back yard of the small cottage in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood of Southeast Portland.
The assailant entered through the open rear door and fired one shot either accidentally or deliberately into the back of an 11-year-old boy sleeping in a makeshift bedroom just off the entryway.
As the killer melted back into the shadows, Joshua Jeffries, a curly-haired, rosy-faced boy who would have begun sixth grade that fall, stumbled through the house and uttered his final words to his guardian: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he collapsed.
The boy's chilling death still unresolved 18 months later is as inexplicable now as it was the morning of Aug. 10, 2001.
Portland police have made no arrests and, as in most cases, have said little to the public or the boy's extended family about leads, evidence, motives or suspects they have pursued. They say they want to protect the integrity of the case.
One of the most revealing public statements that police have made about the shooting death was provided by Detective Shirley McLoughlin, the lead investigator in the case, during a November 2001 news conference.
"The possibility exists that somebody else was the intended victim," she said.
While police have named no "person of interest," Joshua's family and neighbors say there is no lack of suspects in the neighborhood of the house located in the 6500 block of Southeast 48th Avenue, a few blocks south of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. Police and residents acknowledge that the area is known to have a high number of methamphetamine users and dealers.
Left without information, family members and neighbors have been doing their own detective work and have come up with various theories: Joshua saw something he shouldn't have; the killer was startled by something and panicked; the killer was a drug dealer who intended the bullet for someone else.
While the truth is unknown, one thing was clear: Joshua was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"He was just a baby," says Patricia Jeffries, the boy's birth mother. "How can they walk the streets right now, knowing they got the wrong person and killed a child?"
Mature beyond his years
The slaying was a tragic end to a life fraught with impermanence. At 11, Joshua was a sensitive child who barely knew his father but had an abundance of maternal figures in his life.
When his birth mother went to jail when he was young, Joshua was placed into the protective arms of his mother's friend, Gayle Hoefert, a hairdresser.
Throughout his life, he bounced among Hoefert's home and those of his mother and aunt so the state's child protective services agency would not take him away. In his last year, he lived at Hoefert's home, along with her roommate, Diane Lovett; Joshua's sister, Leanna Jeffries, now 18; and Hoefert's daughter, Shannon, now 23.
Hoefert's 24-year-old son, Shaun, who hasn't lived at the house for the past 2 1/2 years, has especially struggled with the boy's death, she says.
Joshua dealt with his circumstances with a maturity that belied his youth.
"Auntie Gayle, when I grow up, I want to buy you a house and take care of you," Hoefert says the boy often told her.
While the 42-year-old Hoefert's own life has been difficult, including dealing with congenital heart disease and diabetes, she always has considered herself the proud lioness who protects her cubs, and she loved Joshua as one of her own.
She didn't let Joshua go to certain houses in the neighborhood; she has never allowed drugs or guns in her house; and she made sure Joshua was home by 5:45 nightly for dinner. The watch he wore to remind him of his curfew now hangs on her car visor and still beeps at every quarter to the hour. Hoefert thinks it's a sign from Joshua.
"It's not a person; it's a monster," she says of the killer. "It is a priority. I want him caught now. Actually, I want him caught Aug. 10, 2001."
It was 95 degrees that day, and Joshua found relief from the heat on a Slip'N Slide at a friend's house down the street.
He got home at 5:45 p.m. for dinner on the barbecue, went back out to another friend's house to play and came home at 8:30 p.m. He changed his clothes, watched "The Mummy" on TV and had a snack.
At 10 p.m., Joshua went to bed in a room at the back of the home that originally served as a laundry room and back entryway.
"We always say, ‘I love you,' and ‘Good night, see you in the morning,' " Hoefert says.
She and Lovett went to bed shortly thereafter in the bedroom in the front of the house farthest from Joshua's room. Leanna says she went to bed close to midnight after returning from the movies. Her room was closest to Joshua's bedroom, separated only by a small kitchen.
A screen door was shut but unlocked, and the outside door was left open to cool the house and allow the dogs to go in and out. "It was hot, and we left it open," Lovett, 42, says of the door. "Now we wish we didn't."
The door also was left unlocked for Shannon, who had been living in a camper at the far end of the back yard. She was asleep in the camper that night.
The house was quiet, except for the buzz of a fan in Hoefert's room.
At 3 a.m., Hoefert remembers rising to use the restroom; at the same time, Leanna was getting a drink of water. They returned to their rooms.
Just before 4:23 a.m., when the 911 call came in, Hoefert said Joshua opened her bedroom door and said clearly, in his normal voice: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he released his grip from the filing cabinet next to her bed and collapsed on the floor.
"He crunched up his little face, picked up his little arms, and down he went," she says.
It was dark, and Hoefert didn't understand what had happened; she thought he might have been walking in his sleep. When she turned on a light, she saw the pool of blood oozing from his side onto the floor. Not having heard any noise, she thought he had been stabbed.
"From there, everything went crazy," she says.
She called 911, then hung up while directing Lovett to apply pressure to the boy's wound. When she called again, she told the dispatcher that the boy had been stabbed. She then called the home of Rhetta Jeffries, Joshua's aunt, where Patricia Jeffries was staying, to tell them to meet at the hospital.
An ambulance rushed Joshua to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:02 a.m.
An autopsy found that Joshua died of a single gunshot wound the bullet entering through his upper back and exiting just under his left arm, Hoefert says.
In retrospect, she says, she was surprised to find that he'd been shot: "I thought he got stabbed; I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear any gunshot."
Alex Ross, who lives across the street, says he heard the muffled sound of a gunshot when he was working on his computer around 4 a.m. He looked at Hoefert's house and saw lights blink on, then heard screaming.
Other neighbors, including Ruth Miller, who lived in the house directly behind Hoefert's at the time of the incident, wonder why they didn't hear the family's dogs bark.
Shannon, sleeping in the camper, said she didn't hear anything.
Anyone walking on the property today will be greeted first by Roswell, a Rottweiler who lets out a threatening growl and barks ceaselessly at strangers as she jumps against the 4-foot-high, chain-link fence. Sema, a dachshund, also demands attention with her high-pitched barks, while a third dog, an 11-year-old basset hound named Winston, is content to lie on the ground and roll in the dirt.
"I'm convinced that it's a family friend, because the dogs would've wakened me up," said Miller, their closest neighbor. "There's three dogs who bark at everybody, including me, all the time. There's no way someone would've gone into that house as a stranger, without my having known it."
Hoefert said detectives wondered the same thing. She says Roswell, who was 9 months old at the time, was sleeping inside that night. She remembers because the dog was right next to Joshua as he lay dying. The dachshund also was asleep inside, she says [Jennifer Anderson]
On Friday, August 10, 2001 at about 4:30 AM, 11-year-old JOSHUA MICHAEL JEFFRIES died as a result of a gunshot wound, while he was asleep in his bedroom at 6548 S.E. 48th Ave., in the City of Portland, Oregon. The unknown suspect apparently entered the home through an unlocked back door.
JOSHUA JEFFRIES had attended Lewis Elementary School and would have been attending Sellwood Middle School in the fall.
There is a cash reward offered for information reported to the Cold Case Homicide Unit that leads to an arrest in this case [Portland Police].
It was before dawn on a balmy summer morning, and the back of the house was lighted in an eerie glow.
Someone used the dim light to slip silently, like an apparition, into the back yard of the small cottage in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood of Southeast Portland.
The assailant entered through the open rear door and fired one shot either accidentally or deliberately into the back of an 11-year-old boy sleeping in a makeshift bedroom just off the entryway.
As the killer melted back into the shadows, Joshua Jeffries, a curly-haired, rosy-faced boy who would have begun sixth grade that fall, stumbled through the house and uttered his final words to his guardian: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he collapsed.
The boy's chilling death still unresolved 18 months later is as inexplicable now as it was the morning of Aug. 10, 2001.
Portland police have made no arrests and, as in most cases, have said little to the public or the boy's extended family about leads, evidence, motives or suspects they have pursued. They say they want to protect the integrity of the case.
One of the most revealing public statements that police have made about the shooting death was provided by Detective Shirley McLoughlin, the lead investigator in the case, during a November 2001 news conference.
"The possibility exists that somebody else was the intended victim," she said.
While police have named no "person of interest," Joshua's family and neighbors say there is no lack of suspects in the neighborhood of the house located in the 6500 block of Southeast 48th Avenue, a few blocks south of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. Police and residents acknowledge that the area is known to have a high number of methamphetamine users and dealers.
Left without information, family members and neighbors have been doing their own detective work and have come up with various theories: Joshua saw something he shouldn't have; the killer was startled by something and panicked; the killer was a drug dealer who intended the bullet for someone else.
While the truth is unknown, one thing was clear: Joshua was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"He was just a baby," says Patricia Jeffries, the boy's birth mother. "How can they walk the streets right now, knowing they got the wrong person and killed a child?"
Mature beyond his years
The slaying was a tragic end to a life fraught with impermanence. At 11, Joshua was a sensitive child who barely knew his father but had an abundance of maternal figures in his life.
When his birth mother went to jail when he was young, Joshua was placed into the protective arms of his mother's friend, Gayle Hoefert, a hairdresser.
Throughout his life, he bounced among Hoefert's home and those of his mother and aunt so the state's child protective services agency would not take him away. In his last year, he lived at Hoefert's home, along with her roommate, Diane Lovett; Joshua's sister, Leanna Jeffries, now 18; and Hoefert's daughter, Shannon, now 23.
Hoefert's 24-year-old son, Shaun, who hasn't lived at the house for the past 2 1/2 years, has especially struggled with the boy's death, she says.
Joshua dealt with his circumstances with a maturity that belied his youth.
"Auntie Gayle, when I grow up, I want to buy you a house and take care of you," Hoefert says the boy often told her.
While the 42-year-old Hoefert's own life has been difficult, including dealing with congenital heart disease and diabetes, she always has considered herself the proud lioness who protects her cubs, and she loved Joshua as one of her own.
She didn't let Joshua go to certain houses in the neighborhood; she has never allowed drugs or guns in her house; and she made sure Joshua was home by 5:45 nightly for dinner. The watch he wore to remind him of his curfew now hangs on her car visor and still beeps at every quarter to the hour. Hoefert thinks it's a sign from Joshua.
"It's not a person; it's a monster," she says of the killer. "It is a priority. I want him caught now. Actually, I want him caught Aug. 10, 2001."
It was 95 degrees that day, and Joshua found relief from the heat on a Slip'N Slide at a friend's house down the street.
He got home at 5:45 p.m. for dinner on the barbecue, went back out to another friend's house to play and came home at 8:30 p.m. He changed his clothes, watched "The Mummy" on TV and had a snack.
At 10 p.m., Joshua went to bed in a room at the back of the home that originally served as a laundry room and back entryway.
"We always say, ‘I love you,' and ‘Good night, see you in the morning,' " Hoefert says.
She and Lovett went to bed shortly thereafter in the bedroom in the front of the house farthest from Joshua's room. Leanna says she went to bed close to midnight after returning from the movies. Her room was closest to Joshua's bedroom, separated only by a small kitchen.
A screen door was shut but unlocked, and the outside door was left open to cool the house and allow the dogs to go in and out. "It was hot, and we left it open," Lovett, 42, says of the door. "Now we wish we didn't."
The door also was left unlocked for Shannon, who had been living in a camper at the far end of the back yard. She was asleep in the camper that night.
The house was quiet, except for the buzz of a fan in Hoefert's room.
At 3 a.m., Hoefert remembers rising to use the restroom; at the same time, Leanna was getting a drink of water. They returned to their rooms.
Just before 4:23 a.m., when the 911 call came in, Hoefert said Joshua opened her bedroom door and said clearly, in his normal voice: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he released his grip from the filing cabinet next to her bed and collapsed on the floor.
"He crunched up his little face, picked up his little arms, and down he went," she says.
It was dark, and Hoefert didn't understand what had happened; she thought he might have been walking in his sleep. When she turned on a light, she saw the pool of blood oozing from his side onto the floor. Not having heard any noise, she thought he had been stabbed.
"From there, everything went crazy," she says.
She called 911, then hung up while directing Lovett to apply pressure to the boy's wound. When she called again, she told the dispatcher that the boy had been stabbed. She then called the home of Rhetta Jeffries, Joshua's aunt, where Patricia Jeffries was staying, to tell them to meet at the hospital.
An ambulance rushed Joshua to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:02 a.m.
An autopsy found that Joshua died of a single gunshot wound the bullet entering through his upper back and exiting just under his left arm, Hoefert says.
In retrospect, she says, she was surprised to find that he'd been shot: "I thought he got stabbed; I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear any gunshot."
Alex Ross, who lives across the street, says he heard the muffled sound of a gunshot when he was working on his computer around 4 a.m. He looked at Hoefert's house and saw lights blink on, then heard screaming.
Other neighbors, including Ruth Miller, who lived in the house directly behind Hoefert's at the time of the incident, wonder why they didn't hear the family's dogs bark.
Shannon, sleeping in the camper, said she didn't hear anything.
Anyone walking on the property today will be greeted first by Roswell, a Rottweiler who lets out a threatening growl and barks ceaselessly at strangers as she jumps against the 4-foot-high, chain-link fence. Sema, a dachshund, also demands attention with her high-pitched barks, while a third dog, an 11-year-old basset hound named Winston, is content to lie on the ground and roll in the dirt.
"I'm convinced that it's a family friend, because the dogs would've wakened me up," said Miller, their closest neighbor. "There's three dogs who bark at everybody, including me, all the time. There's no way someone would've gone into that house as a stranger, without my having known it."
Hoefert said detectives wondered the same thing. She says Roswell, who was 9 months old at the time, was sleeping inside that night. She remembers because the dog was right next to Joshua as he lay dying. The dachshund also was asleep inside, she says [Jennifer Anderson]
The family of Joshua Jeffries asks your help in solving this crime.
On Friday, August 10, 2001 at about 4:30 AM, 11-year-old JOSHUA MICHAEL JEFFRIES died as a result of a gunshot wound, while he was asleep in his bedroom at 6548 S.E. 48th Ave., in the City of Portland, Oregon. The unknown suspect apparently entered the home through an unlocked back door.
JOSHUA JEFFRIES had attended Lewis Elementary School and would have been attending Sellwood Middle School in the fall.
There is a cash reward offered for information reported to the Cold Case Homicide Unit that leads to an arrest in this case [Portland Police].
It was before dawn on a balmy summer morning, and the back of the house was lighted in an eerie glow.
Someone used the dim light to slip silently, like an apparition, into the back yard of the small cottage in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood of Southeast Portland.
The assailant entered through the open rear door and fired one shot either accidentally or deliberately into the back of an 11-year-old boy sleeping in a makeshift bedroom just off the entryway.
As the killer melted back into the shadows, Joshua Jeffries, a curly-haired, rosy-faced boy who would have begun sixth grade that fall, stumbled through the house and uttered his final words to his guardian: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he collapsed.
The boy's chilling death still unresolved 18 months later is as inexplicable now as it was the morning of Aug. 10, 2001.
Portland police have made no arrests and, as in most cases, have said little to the public or the boy's extended family about leads, evidence, motives or suspects they have pursued. They say they want to protect the integrity of the case.
One of the most revealing public statements that police have made about the shooting death was provided by Detective Shirley McLoughlin, the lead investigator in the case, during a November 2001 news conference.
"The possibility exists that somebody else was the intended victim," she said.
While police have named no "person of interest," Joshua's family and neighbors say there is no lack of suspects in the neighborhood of the house located in the 6500 block of Southeast 48th Avenue, a few blocks south of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. Police and residents acknowledge that the area is known to have a high number of methamphetamine users and dealers.
Left without information, family members and neighbors have been doing their own detective work and have come up with various theories: Joshua saw something he shouldn't have; the killer was startled by something and panicked; the killer was a drug dealer who intended the bullet for someone else.
While the truth is unknown, one thing was clear: Joshua was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"He was just a baby," says Patricia Jeffries, the boy's birth mother. "How can they walk the streets right now, knowing they got the wrong person and killed a child?"
Mature beyond his years
The slaying was a tragic end to a life fraught with impermanence. At 11, Joshua was a sensitive child who barely knew his father but had an abundance of maternal figures in his life.
When his birth mother went to jail when he was young, Joshua was placed into the protective arms of his mother's friend, Gayle Hoefert, a hairdresser.
Throughout his life, he bounced among Hoefert's home and those of his mother and aunt so the state's child protective services agency would not take him away. In his last year, he lived at Hoefert's home, along with her roommate, Diane Lovett; Joshua's sister, Leanna Jeffries, now 18; and Hoefert's daughter, Shannon, now 23.
Hoefert's 24-year-old son, Shaun, who hasn't lived at the house for the past 2 1/2 years, has especially struggled with the boy's death, she says.
Joshua dealt with his circumstances with a maturity that belied his youth.
"Auntie Gayle, when I grow up, I want to buy you a house and take care of you," Hoefert says the boy often told her.
While the 42-year-old Hoefert's own life has been difficult, including dealing with congenital heart disease and diabetes, she always has considered herself the proud lioness who protects her cubs, and she loved Joshua as one of her own.
She didn't let Joshua go to certain houses in the neighborhood; she has never allowed drugs or guns in her house; and she made sure Joshua was home by 5:45 nightly for dinner. The watch he wore to remind him of his curfew now hangs on her car visor and still beeps at every quarter to the hour. Hoefert thinks it's a sign from Joshua.
"It's not a person; it's a monster," she says of the killer. "It is a priority. I want him caught now. Actually, I want him caught Aug. 10, 2001."
It was 95 degrees that day, and Joshua found relief from the heat on a Slip'N Slide at a friend's house down the street.
He got home at 5:45 p.m. for dinner on the barbecue, went back out to another friend's house to play and came home at 8:30 p.m. He changed his clothes, watched "The Mummy" on TV and had a snack.
At 10 p.m., Joshua went to bed in a room at the back of the home that originally served as a laundry room and back entryway.
"We always say, ‘I love you,' and ‘Good night, see you in the morning,' " Hoefert says.
She and Lovett went to bed shortly thereafter in the bedroom in the front of the house farthest from Joshua's room. Leanna says she went to bed close to midnight after returning from the movies. Her room was closest to Joshua's bedroom, separated only by a small kitchen.
A screen door was shut but unlocked, and the outside door was left open to cool the house and allow the dogs to go in and out. "It was hot, and we left it open," Lovett, 42, says of the door. "Now we wish we didn't."
The door also was left unlocked for Shannon, who had been living in a camper at the far end of the back yard. She was asleep in the camper that night.
The house was quiet, except for the buzz of a fan in Hoefert's room.
At 3 a.m., Hoefert remembers rising to use the restroom; at the same time, Leanna was getting a drink of water. They returned to their rooms.
Just before 4:23 a.m., when the 911 call came in, Hoefert said Joshua opened her bedroom door and said clearly, in his normal voice: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he released his grip from the filing cabinet next to her bed and collapsed on the floor.
"He crunched up his little face, picked up his little arms, and down he went," she says.
It was dark, and Hoefert didn't understand what had happened; she thought he might have been walking in his sleep. When she turned on a light, she saw the pool of blood oozing from his side onto the floor. Not having heard any noise, she thought he had been stabbed.
"From there, everything went crazy," she says.
She called 911, then hung up while directing Lovett to apply pressure to the boy's wound. When she called again, she told the dispatcher that the boy had been stabbed. She then called the home of Rhetta Jeffries, Joshua's aunt, where Patricia Jeffries was staying, to tell them to meet at the hospital.
An ambulance rushed Joshua to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:02 a.m.
An autopsy found that Joshua died of a single gunshot wound the bullet entering through his upper back and exiting just under his left arm, Hoefert says.
In retrospect, she says, she was surprised to find that he'd been shot: "I thought he got stabbed; I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear any gunshot."
Alex Ross, who lives across the street, says he heard the muffled sound of a gunshot when he was working on his computer around 4 a.m. He looked at Hoefert's house and saw lights blink on, then heard screaming.
Other neighbors, including Ruth Miller, who lived in the house directly behind Hoefert's at the time of the incident, wonder why they didn't hear the family's dogs bark.
Shannon, sleeping in the camper, said she didn't hear anything.
Anyone walking on the property today will be greeted first by Roswell, a Rottweiler who lets out a threatening growl and barks ceaselessly at strangers as she jumps against the 4-foot-high, chain-link fence. Sema, a dachshund, also demands attention with her high-pitched barks, while a third dog, an 11-year-old basset hound named Winston, is content to lie on the ground and roll in the dirt.
"I'm convinced that it's a family friend, because the dogs would've wakened me up," said Miller, their closest neighbor. "There's three dogs who bark at everybody, including me, all the time. There's no way someone would've gone into that house as a stranger, without my having known it."
Hoefert said detectives wondered the same thing. She says Roswell, who was 9 months old at the time, was sleeping inside that night. She remembers because the dog was right next to Joshua as he lay dying. The dachshund also was asleep inside, she says [Jennifer Anderson]
On Friday, August 10, 2001 at about 4:30 AM, 11-year-old JOSHUA MICHAEL JEFFRIES died as a result of a gunshot wound, while he was asleep in his bedroom at 6548 S.E. 48th Ave., in the City of Portland, Oregon. The unknown suspect apparently entered the home through an unlocked back door.
JOSHUA JEFFRIES had attended Lewis Elementary School and would have been attending Sellwood Middle School in the fall.
There is a cash reward offered for information reported to the Cold Case Homicide Unit that leads to an arrest in this case [Portland Police].
It was before dawn on a balmy summer morning, and the back of the house was lighted in an eerie glow.
Someone used the dim light to slip silently, like an apparition, into the back yard of the small cottage in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood of Southeast Portland.
The assailant entered through the open rear door and fired one shot either accidentally or deliberately into the back of an 11-year-old boy sleeping in a makeshift bedroom just off the entryway.
As the killer melted back into the shadows, Joshua Jeffries, a curly-haired, rosy-faced boy who would have begun sixth grade that fall, stumbled through the house and uttered his final words to his guardian: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he collapsed.
The boy's chilling death still unresolved 18 months later is as inexplicable now as it was the morning of Aug. 10, 2001.
Portland police have made no arrests and, as in most cases, have said little to the public or the boy's extended family about leads, evidence, motives or suspects they have pursued. They say they want to protect the integrity of the case.
One of the most revealing public statements that police have made about the shooting death was provided by Detective Shirley McLoughlin, the lead investigator in the case, during a November 2001 news conference.
"The possibility exists that somebody else was the intended victim," she said.
While police have named no "person of interest," Joshua's family and neighbors say there is no lack of suspects in the neighborhood of the house located in the 6500 block of Southeast 48th Avenue, a few blocks south of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. Police and residents acknowledge that the area is known to have a high number of methamphetamine users and dealers.
Left without information, family members and neighbors have been doing their own detective work and have come up with various theories: Joshua saw something he shouldn't have; the killer was startled by something and panicked; the killer was a drug dealer who intended the bullet for someone else.
While the truth is unknown, one thing was clear: Joshua was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"He was just a baby," says Patricia Jeffries, the boy's birth mother. "How can they walk the streets right now, knowing they got the wrong person and killed a child?"
Mature beyond his years
The slaying was a tragic end to a life fraught with impermanence. At 11, Joshua was a sensitive child who barely knew his father but had an abundance of maternal figures in his life.
When his birth mother went to jail when he was young, Joshua was placed into the protective arms of his mother's friend, Gayle Hoefert, a hairdresser.
Throughout his life, he bounced among Hoefert's home and those of his mother and aunt so the state's child protective services agency would not take him away. In his last year, he lived at Hoefert's home, along with her roommate, Diane Lovett; Joshua's sister, Leanna Jeffries, now 18; and Hoefert's daughter, Shannon, now 23.
Hoefert's 24-year-old son, Shaun, who hasn't lived at the house for the past 2 1/2 years, has especially struggled with the boy's death, she says.
Joshua dealt with his circumstances with a maturity that belied his youth.
"Auntie Gayle, when I grow up, I want to buy you a house and take care of you," Hoefert says the boy often told her.
While the 42-year-old Hoefert's own life has been difficult, including dealing with congenital heart disease and diabetes, she always has considered herself the proud lioness who protects her cubs, and she loved Joshua as one of her own.
She didn't let Joshua go to certain houses in the neighborhood; she has never allowed drugs or guns in her house; and she made sure Joshua was home by 5:45 nightly for dinner. The watch he wore to remind him of his curfew now hangs on her car visor and still beeps at every quarter to the hour. Hoefert thinks it's a sign from Joshua.
"It's not a person; it's a monster," she says of the killer. "It is a priority. I want him caught now. Actually, I want him caught Aug. 10, 2001."
It was 95 degrees that day, and Joshua found relief from the heat on a Slip'N Slide at a friend's house down the street.
He got home at 5:45 p.m. for dinner on the barbecue, went back out to another friend's house to play and came home at 8:30 p.m. He changed his clothes, watched "The Mummy" on TV and had a snack.
At 10 p.m., Joshua went to bed in a room at the back of the home that originally served as a laundry room and back entryway.
"We always say, ‘I love you,' and ‘Good night, see you in the morning,' " Hoefert says.
She and Lovett went to bed shortly thereafter in the bedroom in the front of the house farthest from Joshua's room. Leanna says she went to bed close to midnight after returning from the movies. Her room was closest to Joshua's bedroom, separated only by a small kitchen.
A screen door was shut but unlocked, and the outside door was left open to cool the house and allow the dogs to go in and out. "It was hot, and we left it open," Lovett, 42, says of the door. "Now we wish we didn't."
The door also was left unlocked for Shannon, who had been living in a camper at the far end of the back yard. She was asleep in the camper that night.
The house was quiet, except for the buzz of a fan in Hoefert's room.
At 3 a.m., Hoefert remembers rising to use the restroom; at the same time, Leanna was getting a drink of water. They returned to their rooms.
Just before 4:23 a.m., when the 911 call came in, Hoefert said Joshua opened her bedroom door and said clearly, in his normal voice: "Auntie Gayle, someone came into my room." Then he released his grip from the filing cabinet next to her bed and collapsed on the floor.
"He crunched up his little face, picked up his little arms, and down he went," she says.
It was dark, and Hoefert didn't understand what had happened; she thought he might have been walking in his sleep. When she turned on a light, she saw the pool of blood oozing from his side onto the floor. Not having heard any noise, she thought he had been stabbed.
"From there, everything went crazy," she says.
She called 911, then hung up while directing Lovett to apply pressure to the boy's wound. When she called again, she told the dispatcher that the boy had been stabbed. She then called the home of Rhetta Jeffries, Joshua's aunt, where Patricia Jeffries was staying, to tell them to meet at the hospital.
An ambulance rushed Joshua to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:02 a.m.
An autopsy found that Joshua died of a single gunshot wound the bullet entering through his upper back and exiting just under his left arm, Hoefert says.
In retrospect, she says, she was surprised to find that he'd been shot: "I thought he got stabbed; I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear any gunshot."
Alex Ross, who lives across the street, says he heard the muffled sound of a gunshot when he was working on his computer around 4 a.m. He looked at Hoefert's house and saw lights blink on, then heard screaming.
Other neighbors, including Ruth Miller, who lived in the house directly behind Hoefert's at the time of the incident, wonder why they didn't hear the family's dogs bark.
Shannon, sleeping in the camper, said she didn't hear anything.
Anyone walking on the property today will be greeted first by Roswell, a Rottweiler who lets out a threatening growl and barks ceaselessly at strangers as she jumps against the 4-foot-high, chain-link fence. Sema, a dachshund, also demands attention with her high-pitched barks, while a third dog, an 11-year-old basset hound named Winston, is content to lie on the ground and roll in the dirt.
"I'm convinced that it's a family friend, because the dogs would've wakened me up," said Miller, their closest neighbor. "There's three dogs who bark at everybody, including me, all the time. There's no way someone would've gone into that house as a stranger, without my having known it."
Hoefert said detectives wondered the same thing. She says Roswell, who was 9 months old at the time, was sleeping inside that night. She remembers because the dog was right next to Joshua as he lay dying. The dachshund also was asleep inside, she says [Jennifer Anderson]
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