It wasn?t the police who told Rosalind Canada that her 20-year-old son Robert lay dying in the hospital from a gunshot wound on a cold November night in 2004. A cousin, who lived near the 2500 block of Garrett Avenue where Robert Alvin Russell was shot in the back of the head, told her the horrible news.
“The police didn?t call us, we called them,” she says. “It was like my son didn?t matter.”
Canada said her son, a pensive child quick to joke but serious by nature, had fallen in with a bad crowd.
“He did some things I?m not proud of,” she said. “But that didn?t mean his life was valueless.”
Now, Canada said, the case is going nowhere.
“The detective told me people in the neighborhood don?t like to talk to police officers,” she says.”He told me I could probably find out more than he could.”
But almost three years later, Canada says her calls to police are not returned.
“It shouldn?t take months for the police to call back,” she says. “They can find the time to tell the media about a criminal record, but not find the time to call the family.”
Painfully, Canada recalls a conversation she had with her son just months before he died ? the only memory that consoles her.
“He said he watched a man dying on the streets calling out for his mother,” she says. “And we discussed how if something happened to him, he would pray ? he was a prayerful child. I know, at least, that he was with God.”
