Willie Rogers was 27 when he broke into a neighbor’s home in Riviera Beach and killed 75-year-old Earnestine Mortimore.
Rogers, now 58, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on April 29, almost 31 years to the day after Mortimore’s death. Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer sentenced him to 40 years in state prison, with credit for the two years and four months he has already served.
Mortimore’s family attended the hearing by Zoom. In a letter read aloud by their attorney, granddaughter Shatonda Stewart said “no sentence will ever truly feel like enough.”
“We should have had more time with our grandmother, and she should have had time to know her great-grands,” she said. “No amount of time served will ever equal the life that was taken.”
Little is known about what preceded Mortimore’s death. Riviera Beach Police Chief Michael Coleman said detectives suspect Rogers beat and strangled Mortimore during an attempted burglary on April 28, 1995.
Neighbors identified Rogers and another man as potential suspects, Coleman said, though both denied wrongdoing. Detectives interviewed the men, collected DNA samples from both and subsequently released them.
The case went cold until 2023, when detectives from the police department’s newly formed cold-case unit reopened the investigation. They sent several pieces of evidence to the Bode Forensic Technology lab in Virginia for further DNA testing.
Just over a year later, DNA test results identified Rogers as the primary suspect. He was already serving time in state prison for a rape committed more than a decade earlier.
Hannah Phillips covers criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism and subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Riviera Beach man admits he killed his 75-year-old neighbor in 1995
Reporting by Hannah Phillips, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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