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Pieces from the puzzle of James E. Roberts' troubled life
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Location: Blogs Now We're Talking |
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| Posted by: Joe Byrnes |
12/5/2007 8:55 AM |
The Sheriff's Office report, from May 26, 2005, was filed under the category "Children at Risk."
At about 7:30 p.m. that day, Deputy Linda Carson found 16-year-old James E. Roberts sitting along North U.S. 301. He was trying to hitch a ride to his grandmother's house in Citra to pick up his clothes and his dog.
The grandmother, Pearla Floyd, told Carson she used to have custody of Roberts but sent him back to his mother in Ocala because he argued all the time and was breaking things.
His mother, Sherry Ann Mahle, met the deputy at the North District Office and laid out her problems with him:
He was constantly running away, Mahle said, so she had turned him over to her parents.
In the grandmother's petition for custody back in October 2003, she said Roberts needed a settled environment after his brother's death in a traffic accident.
"He does not know if he is up or down," Floyd wrote. "He needs to be here with us so he can settle down and get on with his life as a boy of 14 should."
Mahle had tried to keep Roberts in school. He was expelled, she said, and they tried home schooling. During the previous year, Roberts had attended Lake Weir Middle - until being expelled.
He is "very smart," his mother said. She had tried to get him in a GED program, but he was kicked out at orientation for an "ungovernable attitude." He had been in Mad Dads and had gotten years of counseling.
During the interview, Deputy Carson wrote, Roberts acted bored "with frequent use of crude language and cursing." He said she wouldn't have found him, Carson wrote, "if he hadn't been lost and taken the wrong road."
The wrong road indeed.
Roberts, now 18, and his cousin William A. Myers, 16, were charged with murder last week. Roberts confessed to bashing Robert T. Leigh on the head repeatedly with a baseball bat. The 44-year-old man - who was just passing through town - was on a bench in front of the Western Roundup near their northwest Ocala home.
Myers told Ocala police he was carrying a crowbar-like tool that night in case Leigh resisted. Later, he stabbed the dead man with a pocket knife.
It was a senseless murder, motivated apparently, as one prosecutor said, by "entertainment or out of pure meanness." The question now is why. What was going on with those teenagers, especially Roberts, who admits he wielded the bat?
His mother and grandmother declined to talk to me. They did, however, tell Star-Banner reporter Austin L. Miller that Roberts was never the same after his brother's death in 2001.
In public records, you'll find pieces from the puzzle of his troubled life:
His father, Robbie O. Roberts, is a career criminal with convictions since 1982 ranging from marijuana production to burglary. Mahle divorced him in 1993.
In December 1999, she obtained a restraining order against her sister's husband, and Mahle's sister got one against her.
"She came out her sliding window with a baseball bat," the sister - now Melissa Jean Floyd - wrote in a sworn statement. "She was swinging the bat yelling she was going to crush my skull."
It is worth noting, however, that Melissa Floyd was later convicted of perjury in an unrelated case.
In 2000 and 2002, Mahle ran into trouble with the law. She was sentenced to probation on charges of trying to obtained a controlled substance by fraud and using someone else's credit card.
In August 2001, deputies went to Roberts' home after his stepfather spanked the 12-year-old with a belt.
In December 2001, his older brother, Luke, was killed by a car while sitting at night in the southbound lane of Northeast 30th Court in Citra.
In August 2005, "enraged and growling" against his stepfather, Roberts punched a deputy who had tried to make him sit down, according to a Sheriff's Office report. "When I get out," a sergeant heard the boy say, "I am going to kill my stepfather with a .44 Magnum."
Such a childhood - crowded with grief, rage, lawlessness, violence, family discord and Roberts' own marijuana use - is a cautionary tale, a reminder that a child at risk has to be helped. Otherwise, we all suffer.
Joe Byrnes may be reached at joe@ocala.com, ocala.com/blogs or 352-867-4112. |
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