Wounded Supervisor’s Rural Life No Refuge From Work Violence

Via la Cresta is an afterthought of a street, really, a tiny oasis hidden away in the scrub-brushed foothills east of El Cajon, a place where neighbors prize their private refuge far away from the demons of the big city.

On Friday, the ugly outside world came knocking with a vengeance.

James English, a quiet, neighborly man who loved working in his yard while wearing his signature baseball cap, wouldn’t be coming home that evening. Far out here in the country, neighbors learned that the city had laid claim to one of their own.

Hours before quitting time, English, a 52-year-old supervisor at General Dynamics’ Convair Division, was gunned down at his San Diego workplace, shot in the back of the head at nearly point-blank range by an angry and frustrated ex-colleague.

Late Friday, as English lay in critical condition at UC San Diego Medical Center, his neighbors could only wonder about the violence that befell him.

“Jim is a hell of a guy, a victim of circumstances,” said Bob Helt, a fellow Convair worker who lives across the street from English, looking stunned as he sipped on a Molson Golden Ale. “Jim English is just a super man, a super neighbor. This situation is just not understandable to all of us.”

Earlier, Helt was there as Charlotte English learned of her husband’s injury during a call from Convair executives. He stood outside on the street and saw her off as the English’s 24-year-old son, Jim Jr., drove his mother to the hospital in the family van.

“She just kept asking what his condition was. I told her the best thing we can do right now is be calm and pray that Jim has a good recovery,” he said, watching as his wife pulled two of her own children around her. “That’s all we all can do.”

The shooting provided the shock to pull together this private group of neighbors who usually know better than to pry into each other’s business. On Via la Cresta, people talk over fences but they rarely stop uninvited for coffee or tea, because nobody wants to spoil the next guy’s nirvana, this place of escape from someplace else.

Of the nine houses, one is owned by an ex-cop, the other by an engineer, still another by a Sheriff’s Department dispatcher. And three are owned by General Dynamic employees, a fact the neighbors laugh off as pure coincidence.

While they come from different backgrounds, each works hard to preserve the peace of the tiny street with both old and newer homes, chain-link fences and barking dogs.

Especially the lanky Jim English, who moved to the street about three years ago.

“I’ll tell you what kind of neighbor Jim is,” Helt says. “If Jim saw anyone needing help he’d pitch right in. Once, when someone was putting in a new collection of mailboxes down at the end of the street, Jim got up early, before work, to go down and help. I went along with him, because I felt guilty.”

Nora Holzer and her husband live two doors down from the Englishes. They were good neighbors who, like everyone else on Via la Cresta, kept their polite distance.

They shared the same gardener and exchanged gardening tips. When Charlotte English had neck surgery last year, Nora called her regularly just to check up, fill her in on the goings-on in the neighborhood.

On Friday, after she heard news of the shooting, Holzer drove past the English house, the one with the shrub-covered fence that kept the family Doberman pinscher within bounds.

That’s when she saw Charlotte standing out by the street. And, like before, she did her best to console her.

“She hailed me down like she wanted to talk,” Holzer said of Charlotte English. “She said her husband was one of the ones shot. She was in shock.”

Bob Karo, who lives next door to the Englishes, said he and Jim English would talk over the fence on weekends.

“He loved that yard,” Karo said. “He just liked to be in it on the weekends, sprucing up the trees and cleaning out the weeds. He really liked being up here.”

Recently, though, Karo hadn’t seen much of his neighbor. English was working odd hours, he said, leaving early in the morning or late in the afternoon.

In fact, he hadn’t talked with English in some time.

And then he heard the news that stunned a neighborhood.

Walking up his expansive driveway, shooing away his dog, Racquel, Karo had a theory about the violence that tragically felled a neighbor and friend.

“It’s the whole gun thing,” he said with a shake of his head. “People don’t know any other way to express themselves these days other than shooting another person.

“It’s just so senseless.”