Stanford Football had contacted the coach of Los Angeles High School earlier this year to inquire about 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw, a star running back whose athletic abilities had earned him the distinction of the Southern League’s most valuable player during his junior year.

About a week or two later, Jamiel was shot dead just a few doors away from his home.

Jamiel Shaw, Sr. said his son was returning home from a shopping mall on March 2 when a Latino man opened fire from a nearby car.

Jamiel Sr. said he heard the gunshots crack through the air and ran out to find his son bleeding on the ground. Jamiel was transported to the hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

“It was the worst feeling,” Jamiel Sr. said of his son’s passing. “You’re just stuck in grief mode, and you can’t get out of it. You can’t control your thinking. You just go berserk.”

Los Angeles Police Department officers arrested Pedro Espinoza on March 14 in connection with the shooting. Prosecutors said Espinoza is allegedly a member of the 18th Street gang in Los Angeles and had been released from jail on weapons charges just one day before the shooting.

Authorities said Shaw was not a gang member and called the shooting a random, unprovoked gang attack.

Jamiel Sr. was dedicated to making sure his son would make all the right decisions. He said he had made an “18-year-plan” for his son that would help him stay out of trouble and put him on a path to a bright future.

“If you stay out of trouble, mixed with sports, with good grades, you’re going to make it,” Jamiel Sr. said.

Following the advice of experts who said parents should keep their kids involved in sports, Jamiel Sr. signed his son up for little league sports almost every season and would often coach the teams himself.

The plan sometimes called for what Jamiel Sr. called “tough love.” The night before Jamiel was murdered, his father refused to allow him to attend a party because he worried he might get shot.

It took “a lot of love, a lot of smothering,” Jamiel Sr. said. “I kept him busy.”

Jamiel Sr. said his son thought the plan was crazy at first, but slowly Jamiel became more receptive. He remained dedicated to sports and started having dreams of becoming a physical therapist or a sports agent.

“Eighteen was like his independence day,” Jamiel Sr. said. “We built it up to a time when you can control your life, be in college, start your life off.”

“He bought into it,” Jamiel Sr. added. “He stayed out of trouble.”

By the time his son turned 17, Jamiel Sr. said the plan was almost complete. Jamiel had become a star on the football field and was being watched by many top schools. He said his son was excited when he returned from school one day because his coach told him that Stanford had called inquiring about his transcripts.

“When he said Stanford, that woke everybody up,” Jamiel Sr. said. “That made everyone realize this was big time.”

Jamiel Sr. said the plan ended when he saw his son’s body bleeding on the sidewalk.

“That’s what makes it so bad,” he said. “We think that if we keep them out of trouble, we’ll keep them out of harm’s way.”

Jamiel Sr. said he had just talked to his son minutes before the shooting, telling him to hurry home. When he heard the gun shots go off, he called his son back to see where he was. Jamiel didn’t answer.

Jamiel’s father bolted out the front door at full speed, turned the corner and saw his son laying down on the street. He said he pulled his son’s face up to his own and saw a bullet hole in his head with his chest bleeding. Neighbors had come out to wrestle him away.

“It just devastated everything,” Jamiel Sr. said. “You’re going 100 miles per hour and then you hit a brick wall.”

Jamiel Sr. said he refused to believe his son was dead and sat in the emergency for hours, telling himself that his son was just in surgery and would be coming out soon. He went home later that night thinking this whole thing must be a nightmare. But when he woke up, Jamiel Sr. said he had the same feeling in his chest as when he heard the gun shots the night before.

“I could still see the blood on the sidewalk,” he said.

Jamiel’s mother, Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, had been serving in her second tour of duty in Iraq when she was informed that her son was murdered. Jamiel Sr. said that she was hysterical on the same flight with soldiers who were celebrating their return home.

“That was the worst day of her life,” he said.

Jamiel Sr. said his younger son, Thomas, 9, was close to his older brother and wanted to be like him. He recalled an incident where shortly after his brother’s death, Thomas asked him whether he was going to be killed too.

“He knows it’s serious,” Jamiel Sr. said, “but not how serious.”

Jamiel Sr. said he couldn’t take reading about all of the reports of his son’s death but that the response from the community was overwhelming.

Among the messages broadcast was one from Stanford Football Coach Jim Harbaugh.

“All of our prayers go out to Jamiel Shaw and his family,” Harbaugh said in a statement soon after the shooting. “Jamiel was a young man we were looking forward to getting to know much better. He had a world of opportunity ahead of him, and it is a true tragedy for his bright future to be cut short by this senseless act.”

Jamiel Sr. said he still gets letters from university coaches expressing interest in having Jamiel play for their teams. He received an email from a Rutgers representative, who wanted to check in because the school had not heard from Jamiel in a while.

“That was a hard email to answer,” Jamiel Sr. said.

Although gang violence is common in areas south of Los Angeles High, Jamiel Sr. said his neighborhood had been relatively safe up until the shooting.

“You know it’s there,” he said. “But you don’t really get packs of gangs roaming the streets like you would think.”

Jamiel Sr. said that since his son’s death, a lot of parents have come to him expressing concern that their children won’t be safe no matter what they do to protect them.

“We thought we made it,” he said. “We thought we knew what we were doing.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.