On February 9, trash haulers refused to empty the dumpster because of the stench coming from it. Thinking there was a dead animal inside, the furniture factory owner hired a local man to clean out the bin. The man found Rod's badly decomposed body a week after he had disappeared and four days before a scheduled court hearing on his January arrest. No one had reported him missing.
A local drug dealer's tip led detectives to Randle, Barnett, Thermilus, and Keon Williams. Detectives believe some of the boys were low-level peddlers, but it's unclear whether they were part of a larger gang.
Johnny Randle, Quintin Barnett (shown), and Aspen Thermilus, all age sixteen, were charged as adults in Rod's death. Keon Williams, age fourteen (not pictured), was charged as a juvenile. All were either friends or acquaintances of Rod's
Johnny Randle
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Barnett is charged with Rod's murder. The other boys are charged with felony accessory to murder. Reached by phone, Randle's mother, Felicia Archie, spoke only briefly and did not return follow-up calls. No one came to the door at Barnett's house, nor at Keon Williams's house, on a recent weekday morning. Barnett's mother, Norma Barnett, didn't return calls. Keon Williams's mother, Patricia Williams, answered her phone, but would say only, "I don't want to talk to nobody about it." Thermilus's mother, Amelia Thermilus, answered the door at her Little Haiti house, but declined to speak about her son. She said she had not known Rod.
An eighteen-year-old girl who lives near Randle and knows most of the boys involved questioned whether there was anything accidental about the killing. Based on what she had heard, the girl, who asked that her name be withheld, said it was likely Rod's friends had turned on him for cooperating with the police during his arrest, for being a snitch. "Because that's how it is around here," she said. "This is Haiti."
Television news cameras captured much of Rod's funeral at Hall Ferguson Hewitt Mortuary in Brownsville. There was no coffin, only a framed photograph of Rod on a table, something that irked Irma Williams and led to a verbal confrontation with the funeral home's director days later. Rod's sixteen-year-old sister, Monica, had been picked up on charges of battery against a pregnant teenager at her Broward County high school the day before, but made it to the funeral. She would later be found in violation of her probation terms for attending. His other sister, 21-year-old Latoya, was there with her boyfriend, who would be shot in the stomach during a robbery in Little Haiti less than a week later.
On a recent weekday morning someone who had read about Rod and had seen his baby face in the paper was looking for the site where the boy's body had been found. Asked for directions, a woman sitting quietly on a curb at first didn't recognize the name. Then it came to her. "You mean the boy in the garbage can?"
