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His rage roared from a rifle barrel as a little girl slept. That night of anger costs him his freedom.
By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 1, 2000
LARGO -- Yahaira Carattini wants the neo-Nazi skinhead who killed her 6-year-old daughter with a shot from an assault rifle to sit behind bars for the rest of his life thinking about a simple truth:
Her dead daughter's blood is the same color as his own.
"Maybe God will open your mind and clean your mind," Carattini told Jessy Joe Roten on Thursday as she wiped tears from her eyes. "Everybody is equal."
Roten's attorney says the 19-year-old now sees the error of his prejudiced ways. But for Roten and Ashley Mance, the girl he killed, it's far too late.
A Pinellas circuit judge sentenced Roten to three concurrent life terms for the April 3, 1999, shooting that killed Ashley and wounded her twin sister, Aleesha, and her half-sister, 4-year-old Jailene Jones.
The children were sleeping in the home north of St. Petersburg that their father, Terry Mance, shared with his fiancee, Tracy Townsend. The couple has since married.
Prosecutors say Roten, then 17, was drunk and angry after a fight with his girlfriend when he fired into the house, knowing Townsend and Mance were a biracial couple.
A jury convicted Roten last month of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder for the shooting, which jurors also deemed hate crimes. Under state law, he faced anywhere from 29 years to life in prison.
Roten also pleaded no contest to possessing materials to make a bomb after police found gunpowder and other bomb-making materials in his room at his parents' house.
He was sentenced to five years on that charge, which also is concurrent.
Circuit Judge Nancy Moate Ley told Roten that he could easily have killed all three children, who were sharing a bed. The same bullet that killed Ashley drove straight through Aleesha's chest and nicked Jailene's ear.
"No parent should have to suffer what you and your daughters have had to suffer," the judge told Carattini and Mance. "Your lives have been violated and will never be the same."
Roten, his hateful skinhead tattoos mostly hidden by a jail uniform, offered a soft apology to the family before he was sentenced. His lawyer, Buck Blankner, said he wrote out his words the night of his conviction, before jurors returned their guilty verdict.
Roten, who does not deny he fired the fatal shot, instead said he didn't mean to harm anyone, denying that what he did was motivated by racial hatred.
"I never wanted any of this to happen," Roten told Ashley's parents. "I was blinded by alcohol and adolescent frustrations, things I was too weak to deal with at the time. . . .
"I am sorry. Every waking hour of every day for the past 20 months and for the rest of my life, I will be sorry. Not because of the responsibility I must take. That is something I am accepting. I am sorry because of what I cannot change for you. I cannot imagine the pain this has caused you, and if I could relieve you of it, I would."
Roten displayed no emotion when the judge sentenced him.
Blankner, asking for leniency, noted that Roten had no prior criminal record. He noted that Roten's father was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan and may have introduced him to neo-Nazi literature.
He said Roten was guilty only of manslaughter for recklessly firing a shot he said wasn't intended to kill.
But the judge didn't buy it, saying, "How could anyone hate like this and decide to act out on that hate?"
As she spoke, Jailene, now 6, and Aleesha, 8, sat with family members in the courtroom, sometimes playing with stuffed toys or giggling among themselves, unsure of what was going on around them.
Prosecutors Lydia Wardell and Bill Loughery said that Roten expressed homicidal thoughts to a therapist in 1994 and 1996. Roten said in 1996 that he was going to kill himself or others, Wardell said.
"Hate was his way of life," Wardell told the judge. "Jessy Roten was a walking, talking time bomb. . . . It's time for him to accept responsibility for the hateful thoughts and the hateful actions that bring us here today."
The prosecutor contrasted the written bomb instructions police found in Roten's room with the written notes found on Ashley after her death.
In one, Ashley wrote a note to a friend. In another, she played tick-tack-toe.
"He's writing bomb instructions," said Wardell, nearly breaking into tears as she spoke. "And she's doing what a little girl should do."