Two days after her son was shot to death, she was forced to move
Robin Gore was asleep in bed when her son was shot to death. By the time she got to him, police had already roped off the area in her apartment complex where his body lay on the ground in the dark.
Taborez White, her youngest child, was 19.
“They wouldn’t let me near him,” Gore said. “They said he was shot at close range.”
The last time she saw him, earlier that night last July, she told him to stay home.
“I said, ‘Don’t go out, you don’t need to be with these boys,’” Gore said. “He said, ‘Mom, you don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ll be fine.’
“But my son was associating with the wrong kind of people.”
The police tell Gore that Taborez’s case is an open investigation. They have no leads.
“The police don’t call me. I call them,” she said. “All I know is that it wasn’t drugs.”
Two days after her son was killed, Gore, 64, was notified that her lease would be terminated. She would have to move out of the Miami Gardens apartment complex where she had lived for 20 years.
“I work 12 hours a day. What trouble can I cause?” said Gore, a school bus driver. “I raised three kids there.”
The news that she would have to find a new place to live compounded her pain.
“Robin had suffered a traumatic loss and instead of showing compassion she received notice of non-renewal of her lease because of the way her son was murdered, which was no fault of the victim or his mother,” said Denise
Brown, CEO of the RJT Foundation. “This happens way too often. Families who are grieving are re-traumatized by society.”
Brown nominated Gore for the Miami Herald’s annual holiday Wish Book, which tells the stories of South Florida people in need.
Brown and two other mothers founded the RJT Foundation in 2012 after their three sons were killed. They named the organization in memory of the three young men, who were friends: Roman Edwin Bradley, JaQuevin De’ Nahjee Myles, and Trevin D’Shawn Reddick.