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Mom turns from revenge to justice
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Like anyone else, when her son Robert Lee Rogers was murdered in 2008, Yvette Rogers Prater was angry.
She wanted revenge.
But those thoughts faded, she said, because she had two other children to raise, and she said revenge is not her job; that’s up to God.
Still, Rogers, whose son’s case was never solved, said she relives the pain of her son’s death any time she reads the newspapers or turns on the television and sees that another person has been murdered in Youngstown.
“It’s as if they opened the wound right back up,” Rogers said recently from her home. “I’m grieving again.”
The pain of the sudden, violent, unexpected death of a loved one is not new to her. On Feb. 23, 1992, she was at Gina’s Drive Thru on North Garland Avenue with her fiance, Donald Drake, when some members of the Ready Rock Boyz gang fired several shots.
Drake shoved her to the ground and saved her life.
But he was hit and died. That case has not been solved, either.
“Had he not shoved me I would’ve taken one right here,” she said, pointing to her head. “But when the smoke cleared, he died right in front of my eyes.”
Police said Drake was an innocent bystander and was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was shot. Some in law enforcement credit the Ready Rock Boyz for beginning the influx of crack cocaine in the area from Detroit, which resulted in a crime wave throughout the 1990s that saw 492 people murdered.
From 2001 to 2017, Youngstown has recorded 451 homicides. Police have solved 262 of those cases but the death of Rogers Prater’s son is one of 189 unsolved homicides during that period.
Rogers Prater said her son was a good person who mentored his siblings and other children in their East Side neighborhood. Rogers, 20, was found shot to death about 8:45 p.m. Feb. 7, 2008, in the middle of the roadway on North Bruce Street.
She said she thinks she knows who was involved in her son’s murder and told police, but she is upset that they did not question those people harder.
After 10 years without her son, she said it would make a difference if they were caught, “because they are getting away with murder,” she said.
She lined her son’s friends up in the kitchen shortly after his death and asked them to tell her if they knew anything and she would call the police.
Of her son’s friends, she warned several of them not to strike back. Several of them have been murdered themselves, and one is now in a nursing home because of injuries he received in a shooting.
“It’s like a trickle down effect,” Rogers Prater said. “It’s like there’s a curse on this city.”
She admitted that she, too, in the immediate aftermath of her son’s death, wanted revenge.
“When it first happened, I had homicidal thoughts,” Rogers Prater said. “But then I remembered my faith and my family.”
“Don’t ever take things into your own hands, ever. Vengeance doesn’t belong to us.”
Her son worked two jobs, at a fabricating plant and McDonald’s, and Rogers Prater said she remembers seeing his paychecks after he was killed.
“My son’s paychecks fell through the mailbox after he was murdered,” she said.
Her son also helped clothe and feed several kids in the neighborhood, she added.
The day she was interviewed by a reporter for this story there were news reports about a man who was murdered the night before. She said they were painful to watch.
“Everybody loved my son,” she said.
Anyone with information on this case can call the police department at 330-742-8911.