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Sorrow over slaying connects two strangers
By KATHRYN WEXLER © St. Petersburg Times, published January 18, 1999 TAMPA -- Martha Rogers awakens sometimes in the middle of the night and wanders through her small, north Tampa apartment searching for her husband. Then she remembers she buried him last week. A few blocks away, Colleen Carter is wracked with headaches over the 14-year-old son she fears she failed. The women have never met, but their lives became intertwined during a few horrible moments in their crime-choked neighborhood that borders the University of South Florida's palm-lined campus. Two nights after Christmas, Martha Rogers, 52, was strolling hand-in-hand along 19th Street with her husband, Donald, when two men approached them, demanding money. Donald Rogers said he didn't have any. One man pumped a few bullets into Rogers, a plumber who earned $7 an hour. Martha cradled her husband of 26 years as he lay dying, her shirt awash with his blood. Two days later, Hillsborough County detectives put Colleen Carter, 36, and her son, Aaron Todd Ashley, in the back of a patrol car and drove to a sheriff's station. "How would you like it if someone shot your mama down in cold blood?" Carter said they asked Aaron. Her son said he wasn't the one with the gun. Officials weren't swayed. Mario Preston, 26, pulled the trigger, they said, but Aaron was equally responsible for Rogers' death. When Martha Rogers saw Colleen Carter on TV, dissolving into tears and asserting her son wasn't capable of murder, she screamed in rage. Carter, a woman with an eighth-grade education and a prison record for drug-related offenses, wanted to raise her four sons free from the hurt she says she suffered in her own family. Physical and sexual abuse left her suicidal and unwilling to discipline her own children, she said. When Aaron was little, he showed a talent for drawing and wanted to be a firefighter. But Carter said she couldn't keep him away from the street life of drugs and older boys. She fears she inadvertently helped send him there. * * *Rogers' murder was just one more random act of violence in a neighborhood where deputies long ago gave up volunteering their Saturdays to pick up trash because the lots were filthy again two days later. The nicknames for the 8-square-mile neighborhood make sheriff's Maj. Albert Perotti wince: Suitcase City, the Hole, the Shooting Gallery. High hopes in the '60s and '70s that the neighborhood would become a bedroom community for USF dried up when the upscale renters didn't materialize. Property owners dropped rents and let apartments deteriorate. Poor people pushed out of Tampa by urban renewal settled into the sprawling, low-budget apartments. Crime soared. The area was so blighted that in 1994 it received a federal Weed and Seed grant worth up to $750,000 annually, partly so deputies had the tools to make arrests on the smallest of offenses. Perotti sees progress. Over the past five years, major crime such as robbery, assault and burglary has fallen 25 percent. Still, the area bounded by Fowler and Bearss avenues and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and Nebraska Avenue remains the most dangerous place to live in unincorporated Hillsborough. "I wouldn't want to walk through here at night," Lt. Johnny Hill said, "but it's better than it was three years ago." The evening of the murder, the Rogerses left for a five-minute walk to their son Stacey's home to check on his apartment. "If we're not back in 30 minutes, call the law," Donald Rogers told their daughter Brenda Hodges, who lives with her husband and two children in her parents' two-bedroom apartment. Hodges, 29, did as she was told. Thirty-five minutes later, the 911 operator told her there was a shooting on 19th Street. She ran out of the house and around the corner and found her father lying on the ground and her soft-spoken mother screaming like never before. Witnesses immediately stepped forward, naming Aaron and Preston. * * *Colleen Carter said she wasn't much of a mother to Aaron, who celebrated his 14th birthday last weekend at the Hillsborough Juvenile Detention Center. "I guess we're more like brother and sister than mother and son," Carter said last week Originally from St. Louis, Carter essentially was on her own at 13 and never mastered the tools to navigate the social or legal system, she said. "When you ain't got no high school diploma, you really can't understand no big words they be using anyway," she said. Aaron's father, also Aaron Ashley, contributed to his son's upbringing with an occasional phone call, Carter said. He has an extensive criminal record and is in state prison for aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer and violating probation. In the past few weeks, Carter said, she noticed her son was getting high on drugs: His eyes were glassy, he was hyperactive, and he laughed constantly. But the trouble began about five years ago, when Aaron was caught shoplifting. Since then, records show, he has bounced in and out of medium-security residential homes. He would spend several months in the programs, get released, and then slip up again. Aaron made some strides last year, his case file suggests. He was slowing down his impulses and better managing his anger, one counselor found, but he was easily persuaded by his peers. When Rogers was murdered, Aaron was on house arrest awaiting trial for marijuana possession, records show. Carter said he often stayed out all night, despite orders that he be in by 6 p.m. She blames herself. "It's probably more my fault than it is his," she said. "He wanted to stay home and play Nintendo games, and I wouldn't let him play it because it messes up your TV." After Aaron implicated Preston in the murder, Carter said, they held him as a witness. Crying and scared, she bid him goodbye. It wasn't until she saw Aaron on the evening news that she realized he had been charged with murder. She had never before seen Preston, a felon. In small ways, Carter has tried to show her love for Aaron and his three older brothers, two of whom are in trouble with the law. She had their initials tattooed on her chest. And she framed a certificate Aaron once got from one of his treatment programs. Carter says she feels for Martha Rogers. But her sympathy is always coupled with protests that her son doesn't deserve to be facing a murder charge, which could send him to prison for life. Rogers says she, too, has some sympathy for Carter, though she wants both Carter and Aaron to pay for her pain and loss. Why didn't Carter keep closer tabs on her son? "I tried my best," said Carter, whose mother was an alcoholic and whose father didn't bother to give her his last name. "I never hit my children. I guess I tried to treat them better than I was treated when I was little."
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