‘I just want justice’; mother makes plea for leads, arrests
Oldest son was shot dead at point-blank range in August 2015.
RIVIERA BEACH — During the last three years, Sharee Brooks has pieced together much of what happened the night her son was murdered outside a popular Riviera Beach convenience store. After all, the streets talk.
But they haven’t said enough to lead to an arrest in Connis Robinson’s August 2015 murder.
“That’s why this upsets me so much,” Brooks said. “Everybody knows. They know what happened to my child.”
Riviera Beach police have pinpointed a motive — a beef the 25-year-old’s cousin had with some men — and narrowed the suspects to two.
“Unfortunately, I need a little bit more,” said Riviera Beach Detective Francisco Aguirre.
So Brooks waits for the justice she promised her son during his final hours alive at St. Mary’s Medical Center, a justice she insists comes in a courtroom, not on the streets.
“I don’t want any more bloodshed,” Brooks said last month. “In the beginning I did. I was angry. ... But the more I talk to God, I forgive.
“I just want justice.” Robinson, Brooks’ oldest son and a father of five, was shot dead at point-blank range Aug. 11, 2015, outside the Touchdown Food, or “Tiger,” Store on Old Dixie Highway while he slept in the front pas-
senger seat of a friend’s car.
Surveillance-camera footage from the city’s SKY1 technology, as well as from the store, show the gunman head for the passenger side of the car, fire multiple rounds and run off. The city’s ShotSpotter system detected seven shots.
Robinson died the next morning, leaving Brooks in a years-long haze of grief and anger marked by the ever-present question, “Why?”
To not figure out what happened: “I would be less than a mother to not get out and do my part,” she said.
The shooting
Robinson called his mother Aug. 10, 2015. It was a Monday, her day off.
He wanted his hair cut, and she agreed, as long as he promised to take her to run some errands.
He did, and treated her to lunch as well, Brooks recalled.
The next day Robinson, a security guard, worked a double shift, Brooks said. Yet he made time that Tuesday to visit with each of his five kids. His oldest was days away from starting kindergarten. His youngest was 4 months old.
That night, Robinson met up with a friend who drove with him to the Tiger store. She parked her sedan and went inside to grab a cigarette, Riviera detectives said.
Surveillance-camera footage shows her walk back to the driver’s side of the car, as a man hurries toward the passenger side where Robinson was sleeping.
As she stepped into the car, the man fired multiple shots at Robinson. He then ran back around the store, allowing one of the store’s cameras to capture a glimpse of his face, albeit a grainy one.
The woman, who detectives have not publicly identified, told authorities she’d never seen the man before.
The gunman came and went in eight seconds.
After the gunfire, video shows the woman immediately throw the car into reverse and speed out of the lot. She tried to rush Robinson to a hospital, but she crashed nearby.
Aguirre said her reaction suggests she didn’t know about the targeted attack against Robinson.
“She was trying to get Mr. Robinson some help,” Aguirre said.
Riviera Beach Fire Rescue crews arrived at the car wreck scene and took the dying Robinson to St. Mary’s.
He lived a few more hours, giving his mother time to promise: “If it’s the last thing I did, I would get justice for him and his children.”
Raising Connis
Robinson entered the world two months early, Brooks said.
She was 17 and a few weeks away from graduating from high school when she gave birth to him. She had to wait two days even to see him, and complications from the premature birth kept him in St. Mary’s Medical Center for five weeks.
He came home the morning of her graduation from Palm Beach Gardens High School.
“I was so excited, I left home without the car seat,” Brooks said.
Connis Robinson weighed only 5 pounds.
Brooks remembers her father poking his head into the room where she was bathing her tiny baby.
“And my dad said, ‘That looks like a little bitty wet rat,’” she said with a laugh. The nickname “Rat” stuck.
Robinson, the oldest of six, was Brooks’ “whiz kid,” she said. In second grade, he was placed in Lake Park Elementary School’s gifted program, so his grandfather made a bet with him. For, every “A” Robinson earned on a report card, his grandpa promised to give him $20.
“Every report card my dad was out of about $140,” Brooks laughed.
As a teen, Robinson studied at the Eagle Academy in Belle Glade, a military-style school for Palm Beach County students, and went on to Palm Beach Lakes High School, Brooks said.
At 19, Robinson became a dad. Over the next six years, he’d have four more kids. Those babies changed everything for him, Brooks said.
In one of their last heart-to-hearts, Robinson told his mother: “I just want you to be proud of me like you was when I was a kid.”
Not long afterward, he earned his security license. He showed up unannounced one day at his mother’s barbershop dressed in his security uniform and saluted her.
“I was so proud,” Brooks said.
He quickly landed a job he loved, she said. He was looking into opportunities with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
His passion for security work inspired his sisters and mother to get their security licenses after he died. One day, Brooks wants to open her own security company named in Robinson’s honor.
Waiting for justice
Robinson’s funeral was packed, Brooks said, with friends and family who gravitated toward his loving spirit.
Riviera Beach police also were there, she said, at her request. They did their jobs well, she said, but she’s worried their efforts came too late.
“If you all can do this for a funeral,” she said about the patrols, “why can’t you do this in the city on the regular? I only see Riviera Beach step in to place after.”
And she has seen it time and time again.
Since Robinson’s death, 37 people have been killed in the city, according to a Palm Beach Post online database. More than half of those cases remain unsolved, according to police and court records.
Many cases, like Robinson’s, were “targeted attacks” in which detectives have a good feel for who the gunman was, but not enough to make an arrest, police said.
That isn’t, and never will be, enough for Brooks.
“I’m not gonna stop until I have my day in court with the young man who pulled the trigger,” she said.