Suspect told lawmen he killed girl, 9, and her father

A man indicted in an Arivaca double-murder case confessed the day he was arrested, but he will not be offered a plea deal, a Pima County Sheriff’s investigator said Tuesday.

Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush, 34, admitted to the May 30 murders of a man and his 9-year-old daughter shortly after he was arrested in Kingman on June 11, Lt. Michael O’Connor said.

“He did say that the day we arrested him in Kingman,” O’Connor said. “He admitted to both murders.”

Paperwork filed in the Pima County Attorney’s Office indicates Bush “has confessed locally to two murders, one of a 9-year-old child.” But O’Connor said Bush wasn’t offered a plea deal in exchange for his full confession.

“He murdered a little girl,” O’Connor said. “I think that was hard on him.”

Bush has a history of mental illness, according to Chelan County (Wash.) court paperwork, in which he claimed he’d been treated for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia since the mid-1980s. During a January 1998 stolen property case, Bush argued that his ill health would obstruct his ability to assist in his own defense.

“For most of my life since the age of 11 or 12, I have had an experience of being outside myself, of watching another person take over my body,” Bush said in the court declaration. “I start going haywire and I don’t know what I’m doing or why. It’s like being in a daze. I don’t know why it happens and it scares me. It’s like someone else crawls under my skin. It is very frustrating.”

Nevertheless, Bush entered a plea of not guilty June 30, along with Shawna Forde and Albert Robert Gaxiola, also being held in connection with the murders.

Raul Flores Jr., 29, and his daughter Brisenia were shot in the head after several people dressed in camouflage and military gear invaded their Arivaca home. Flores’ wife was shot three times, but managed to fend off the intruders by firing back at them and wounding one, now identified as Bush by officials.

Forde, the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a border protection group in which Bush was a high-ranking member, hatched the plot to rob and kill drug dealers and steal their money to fund the group’s border operations, officials said.