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Parents baffled by teen's final hours
By LEONORA LaPETER
The 16-year-old boy left the apartment in the middle of the night, jailhouse shower sandals on his feet in the chilly night air. He wore no jacket, left the TV on in his room, the front door ajar, the cordless phone on the railing outside the apartment. A little later Christopher Greene was dead, shot early Saturday morning by a sheriff's deputy who caught him robbing a convenience store and raping the store clerk. On Monday his parents, Bob Greene and Tina Van Doren-Ruppell, sat in Greene's apartment on 37th Avenue N in the Disston Heights neighborhood, taking phone calls and making funeral arrangements. They said it was incomprehensible to them that the boy, who attended a Baptist church twice a week, could be lying in front of the TV in his bedroom one minute and hours later commit such a violent crime 5 miles away. They blame someone, or something, for their son's demise. Maybe gang friends. Maybe drugs. But they're not ready yet to blame Christopher. "It doesn't make any sense," said Van Doren-Ruppell, a registered nurse from Palm Harbor. "I think that's the hardest thing. Chris didn't, in a few hours, become a violent child. There has to be something more that we don't know yet." Police are looking for a witness who may have seen a dark-colored pickup truck speeding from the area. The witness told police about the pickup truck but disappeared without giving a name. The information might be important for police, who are trying to understand how Greene ended up so far from his father's apartment. Christopher Greene was no stranger to police. He'd been arrested so often that he was designated a habitual offender, police said. He'd run into authorities for everything from smoking in a high school restroom to beating up another boy at a skate park whom he thought was in a gang. And Greene had been in jail for 26 days on charges of armed residential burglary when his father put up the $2,500 bond to release him just five hours before his death. But Bob Greene, who thinks his son was involved with a gang, said he thought Christopher was trying to straighten out his life. He'd left the Gibbs High School sophomore in jail for 26 days to teach him a lesson. But then Christopher said he needed to get back in school before the end of the fall semester to avoid losing his place in Gibbs, so the father relented and posted bond. At the bail bondsman's, a Christmas party was under way. So they signed the paperwork, ate turkey and pie and joined the festivities. After they got home, Bob Greene, 67, a retired hotel executive, said he checked on his son and found him in bed watching TV just after midnight. In undressing for the night, the father left his pants on the floor in front of his bedroom door. Inside his pockets were the keys to his 2002 Honda Accord and $250 in cash. About 2:20 a.m., he said, he woke up and found his son gone. But the son had not taken the Honda or the cash. About an hour later, Christopher Greene used a gun to rob the Sunoco at 7091 Park Blvd., deputies said. He removed the cash from the register, setting off an alarm that hailed police. Then he told the clerk to take off all her clothes and pulled her into a nearby hallway where he raped her, deputies said. Deputy Gerald Creaser arrived minutes later, and the teenager pointed a gun at him, deputies said. Creaser fired four shots, hitting the teenager three times. Greene died about an hour later at the hospital. Bob Greene said his son left a note on the floor of the living room saying he planned to get out of his gang. The son was known to have worn red bandanas around his head and arm, a red T-shirt, a red cap tilted sideways. Deputy Cal Dennie, a spokesman for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, said his office was investigating Greene's possible ties to gangs, but the county's gang unit has no record of his being involved in one. At least one of the police reports involving Greene indicate that he was at least aware of gangs more than a year ago. At a skate park in Pinellas Park in August 2001, Greene and a friend approached a boy who was sitting on a bench with two girls and asked him what gang he was in. He told them he didn't belong to a gang, but they insisted that he straighten out his black hat, which was tilted to the side. Greene and his friend then tackled the boy and kicked him in the stomach, back and head, according to Pinellas Park police reports. Christopher's parents, however, maintain that he was a gentle boy who never hurt anyone. They pointed to dozens upon dozens of calls from Christopher's friends, most of them young girls distressed over Christopher's death. "Even though he was 16, he was still a child," Van Doren-Ruppell said.
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