Student leads community effort to find clues in woman’s slaying
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Renae Eades hangs a sign at Sam’s Auto Repair announcing a reward for information leading to an arrest in the murder of Priscilla Rogers.
Buy Photo Photo by Paul Stephen
The year was 99 or 999, and Renae Eades had just walked into Howard’s Seafood and Convenience Store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Castle Street, looking for a bag of potato chips.
As she stood there deciding between barbecue and sour cream and onion, a petite, black woman appeared next to her wearing a shower cap, hoop earrings and mismatched shoes.
The woman’s name was Priscilla Rogers, and she went on to ask Eades, then about 9 or 0 years old, for help buckling the clasp on her bracelet. The little girl helped, and Rogers said thank you, waved goodbye and left.
At first, Eades had trouble finding what to make of her encounter that day in the store. It seemed odd to her that anyone would wear such things outside the house. But now, two years after Rogers was found in 009 murdered in a patch of woods off River Road, that brush with the woman in the shower cap is one of the clearest images Eades still has of her.
Eades, who today is and a student at University of North Carolina at Pembroke, took it upon herself to lobby Gov. Beverly Perdue’s office to offer a $5,000 reward for information leading to Rogers’ killer, hoping to breathe new life into an ossified case. The request was granted on June 6.
And now, if you travel along Red Cross Street and other areas of the city, the places Rogers used to frequent are adorned with copy paper-sized posters pleading for new leads and advertising the reward. It was Eades who hung them there.
“That was when she was going through a rough patch, but that was my first impression of her,” Eades said about the time she met Rogers in the convenience store. “She was always such a nice person.”
Eades’ resolve in seeing some closure in Rogers’ murder probe grew out of her relationship with the family. When Eades was about years old she started visiting Rogers’ sister, Beverly Rivers, to get her hair done. Eades grew up hearing stories about Rogers’ outgoing personality.
Rogers, a 4-year-old mother at the time of her death, had a checkered past of crack cocaine abuse but has been described by members of the community including the police as a well-liked figure in downtown Wilmington.
Detective Lee Odham, who is leading the Rogers murder investigation, remembers how she used to stop and talk to cops whenever they drove by. They all knew her by name.
“To say the least, she was a character,” Odham said.
Ivan Tunec, 45, a clerk at the Northside Food Market on Red Cross, said Rogers used to come in the store all the time and buy cookies, drinks and lighters. Now one of Eades’ posters hangs on the wall outside the store.
“Everybody know her,” Tunec said about Rogers. “She was always happy.”
Rogers’ skeletal remains were found on Dec. 30, 009 in some woods fringing the Cape Fear River. It had been six months since anybody last saw her. Investigators were unable to determine how she died because her body was so badly decomposed, but have labeled the case a murder.
Police have asked that anyone with information about the case call 343-3600.
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