Jena Schuch’s death at first was though to be an accident. That’s what her boyfriend told police. He claimed she mishandled a .12-gauge shotgun and killed herself. After a two-month investigation, Springfield police arrested Schuch’s boyfriend for murder.

Schuch, a 28-year-old mother of two, had only been living in Springfield for six months. I talked to her mom and friends to find out more about her and what her life in Springfield and back home in Michigan had been like.

‘She always had a smile’ / Boyfriend charged with Springfield woman’s murder
Nov. 9, 2003

Jena Schuch came to Springfield in March hoping for a fresh start.

Eight months later, family and friends are mourning her death, shocked that her boyfriend, Phillip Peterson, is in Sangamon County jail charged with murdering the 28-year-old woman on Sept. 13.

Peterson has maintained Schuch’s death was an accident caused when she mishandled a shotgun inside the garage apartment they shared in the 1800 block of South Wirt Street. However, those who knew her said Schuch was a skilled hunter who learned how to handle a gun properly when she was 12 years old.

“I would really like to see him face to face and say, ‘Look me in the eye and tell me what happened.’ There’s just a part of me that wants to do that so bad,” said Schuch’s mother Sue Gustafson. “I have a lot of questions the more I stop and think about things. My mind keeps saying why would you do that? There is no reason. I can’t think of a single reason.”

Jeny Shanoski, one of Schuch’s friends from Florence, Wis., described Schuch as a resilient woman and a good mother who’d experienced her share of bad luck.

“She was the kind of person if I hadn’t seen her for years, if she walked through the door it would be just like I’d seen her yesterday. She always had a smile on her face. You couldn’t keep her down for long,” said Shanoski, who lives in Bloomington.

“She always seemed to bounce back. She was always OK, and this time she wasn’t. I think that was hard for people to deal with.”

Schuch grew up in Florence, a rural community of 2,300 in northeastern Wisconsin on the Michigan border, an area known for its hunting, fishing and other outdoor attractions.

A high school graduate who worked a series of waitressing jobs, Schuch had been through a difficult divorce, according to friends and family. She and her ex-husband shared custody of their sons, 8-year-old Jeremy and 5-year-old Joseph, but the boys had been living recently with him. She’d been in a car accident and at one point had no job, no car and few prospects.

“It just seemed like it was one thing after another for her,” Shanoski said. “She wasn’t blessed with money, so she always struggled with that. Not having gone to school or anything, her only option basically was waitressing. There’s not much up there, so if you get stuck up there, unless you work at one of the mills, there’s not a lot of work.”

Schuch’s brother, Jerod, was living in Springfield last spring when she made the nine-hour drive from Florence for a visit. She liked what she saw of the city and thought it might be a good place to put some distance between herself and Florence, with plans of eventually moving back to Wisconsin to be near her boys. She’d developed an interest in auto-body work, something she considered as a possible career.

She landed a job waitressing at Smokey Bones restaurant and began dating Peterson, a 22-year-old U-Haul employee she met through her brother.

The two eventually began living together in a garage apartment behind Peterson’s great-grandmother’s house. They had no telephone in the apartment, which made it difficult for family and friends to reach Schuch. They usually left messages with the grandmother, and Schuch eventually would call them back.

Schuch called both Gustafson and Shanoski the afternoon she died. She had been planning to visit her mother that weekend, but Peterson’s truck needed repairs and she had to postpone the trip. She was in a good mood and doing laundry. She told Gustafson she and Peterson had been working hard, so they were going to rent a movie that night.

“I was very happy to talk to her. I was missing her because I hadn’t talked to her in a couple weeks. I told her I miss you and love you. I was so looking forward to seeing her,” Gustafson said.

Shanoski said the afternoon of Schuch’s death was the first time they had talked in several weeks. Schuch called her about 3:30 p.m. and they spoke for 30 minutes.

“She sounded really good. She said she was doing real well. Things had started to straighten out for her. She had some really good friends at Smokey Bones,” Shanoski said. “She got my number, and we were going to get together on Wednesday because I was coming to town.”

What happened after that is unclear. According to Springfield police, Schuch was shot about 6 p.m. with a 12-gauge shotgun. She was rushed to Memorial Medical Center, where she died at 8:42 p.m. while undergoing surgery for a bullet wound to her shoulder.

Peterson gave police an account of what happened, but authorities said there are inconsistencies. He told investigators he was moving the shotgun and Schuch asked him for it. She handed it back to him, allegedly with the barrel pointed toward her, and the gun went off, according to his account.

“I called him and asked what happened,” Gustafson said. “He said he tried to save her and he couldn’t. He was crying pretty hysterically.”

Police arrested Peterson on Oct. 22. He is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is jailed on $1 million bond. Peterson apparently tried to kill himself at least once, and a judge has ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. He is scheduled to appear in court again in mid-December.

Gustafson said Schuch’s boys are coping with their mother’s death, and added it is painful to know Schuch will never again help them with homework, carve Halloween pumpkins with them or teach them about fishing. She said the boys have been asking questions about heaven and how to get there.

Shanoski said she has difficulty talking about Schuch’s death.

“I wish to God I’d just said to her, ‘Come and stay with me.’ And I wish I’d tried harder to find her. I called her work, I called his grandma, but I always thought I’ll be there next week. It makes me wish I’d found out where that restaurant was and gone and told her I’m going home this weekend, do you want to go,” she said.

To help her cope with her friend’s death, Shanoski has written down some memories, recalling a prom they both went to, skiing escapades that included a piggy-back stunt, riding all-terrain vehicles and spending their summers together on Fisher Lake.

“She was fun. She just had a way about her to make people laugh. She came over here one night, and we sat in the basement and laughed for hours about the stupid things that we used to do. We got in a lot of trouble together. We always said to each other, ‘Let’s go do something so we have something to tell our grandchildren about,’” Shanoski said.

“It’s just a lot easier to believe it was an accident. I never imagined it would hurt so bad. I never imagined anything like this could happen.”