Killer Kids

My dad's name is Rod Robinson. He's 46. My mom, Geraldine Williams, would have been 46. She died on Mother's Day when I was seven. AIDS, they said, but I didn't really understand at the time. Anyway, Hatchet and Winnie (that's my mom's nickname) met when they were younger than me, at Dunbar Elementary in Overtown.

When my parents finally got together, they were living in some projects in Brownsville. Dad and mom never got married and my dad isn't on my birth certificate, but we were pretty much a family from what I can remember. We never really got settled anywhere, though. We had to move a lot, from Brownsville to Overtown to the Edison Courts in Little Haiti.

I guess my dad couldn't really take care of us after mom passed. He has gout and his knees are kind of in rough shape after all those years working in a warehouse and doing landscape work for the county. He's on disability now. So me, Monica, and Latoya went to live with Auntie Jean, my mother's big sister. Her place was at 77th Street and NW Third Avenue. She was like my mom.

Irma Williams, Rod's "Auntie Jean," is only 47 but her hollowed eyes are those of a worried grandmother. She wears her hair in dreadlocks up in a leopard-skin wrap, a stray braid or two hanging over her pierced eyebrow. Recently, sitting on a plastic-covered sofa at a friend's place in the Little River Terrace projects — she spends the days there, the nights at a shelter downtown — Williams dragged on a Bronco Menthol and held her chin in her bony hand. Black window blinds were drawn tight against the sun. Outside the cinder-block house, concrete steps lead to a concrete path which leads down to a concrete sidewalk. Across the street, a massive concrete wall — a sound barrier for I-95 — is the only view.

"He was the baby," Williams recalled of her years raising Rod. As a little boy, he would run to his aunt whenever his sisters were out to beat on him. He liked to curl up in bed with Williams. He cried easily. "He was spoiled," Williams said. "You couldn't beat him."

Williams worked hard during those years. Rod's father had given her custody but no child support. Her $450 weekly salary as a dialysis technician at Joe DiMaggio Memorial Hospital in Hollywood was too high to qualify for food stamps or federal housing aid. So she worked thirteen-hour days. "I was scratching by," she remembered. She took pride in being able to give Rod and his sisters relatively lavish gifts — like bicycles — for Christmas and birthdays.

Williams's old place — a two-bedroom apartment at NE Third Avenue and 77th Street — has metal bars over the windows; the front door and air conditioner hang out of the front wall. When Rod wasn't running around in the back yard, he was at Johnny Randle's house just around the corner. The walk there took him past rundown houses with cracked windows, cars parked on front lawns, and a rusty, disused swing set in someone's yard. The boys would play in Randle's yard, or sometimes, when more friends came, take their tackle football games to the lawn outside the Cathedral of St. Mary a few blocks west.

Rod's friend Javon Carter remembers those "street football" games. Carter lived across the street from Rod. The two met at Little River Elementary School when they were both six years old. They often sat around dreaming of the future, Carter said. "We gonna have a job, we gonna go to each others' houses, we gonna have fun," Carter recalled Rod saying. They'd live in big houses. Rod would drive a Chevy Impala or maybe a Camaro. Rod was smart; he'd be fine, Carter remembered thinking. "His report cards would always be better than mine."

Before he quit playing football about two years ago, Rod used to tell his aunt he would go pro someday and buy her a new Lexus. "I would just say to him, 'Just buy me a Toyota'," Williams said, smiling faintly.

Because Williams worked such long hours, Rod's sister Latoya often took on the role of mother. She watched as her baby brother came to know the drug- and violence-ridden reality of the streets around him. "He got more mature, like he really understood what was happening," she said. By the time he was done with elementary school, Rod realized it was every man for himself.

On a recent weekday afternoon in Rod's old neighborhood, several people shrugged when asked if they had known the boy. Some said they were new to the area, or that they had only heard of Rod in the news. They didn't know what he looked like, where he had lived, what kind of kid he was. One teenage girl who declined to give her name said she had known Rod, but could say only, "He was a good kid." When a heavily tattooed teenage boy pulled up in a SUV with tinted windows, he ignored questions about Rod, turning up the volume on his stereo instead.