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| Son's Release Ends In Death |
| By Tampa Tribune |
| Published: 01/02/2003 |
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In the daily telephone calls he made to his father from the Pinellas County Jail, 16-year-old Christopher M. Greene sounded as if he were beginning to realize his life as a fledgling gang member was leading him nowhere. So Greene's father, Robert, a 67-year-old retired hotel and restaurant executive, made his son's $25,000 bail Friday night, after the tenth-grader had spent 25 days behind bars on two burglary charges. Robert Greene said he wanted his boy home for Christmas. The two happened upon a holiday party at Callahan Bail Bonds, where Robert had arranged for his son's release, and had an impromptu celebration, feasting on turkey, mashed potatoes, cakes and pies. When they got to the two-bedroom apartment they share in St. Petersburg, they talked and prayed, reading the Bible together. Robert went to bed earlier than his son but checked on him one last time as Christopher was watching television in his own room. Each told the other that he loved him. Robert Greene never saw his boy again. Christopher, authorities say, hadn't made a turn-around after all. After his father fell asleep, Christopher sneaked out. And at 3 a.m. Saturday, or roughly five hours after his release from jail, he was fatally shot by a Pinellas sheriff's deputy who found him in a back room of a Sunoco gas station, raping a 31-year-old female clerk, sheriff's officials said. The woman was ordered at gunpoint by Greene to take off her jeans and T-shirt, Pinellas sheriff's spokesman Cal Dennie said. When Deputy Jerald Creaser came upon the sexual assault, hearing the woman's screams, Greene pointed his weapon at the deputy, and the deputy fired four times, striking Greene three, Dennie said. Dennie said deputies were alerted to trouble at the Sunoco gas station at Park Boulevard and Belcher Road by an alarm company. The security company has provided investigators with a surveillance tape of the incident. Greene had demanded and received money before he ordered the clerk to take off her clothes, jumped the counter and sexually assaulted her, Dennie said. ``Impossible,'' Robert Greene said of the events as recounted by the sheriff's office. ``Christopher was - and a lot of dads say this - basically a real good kid,'' he said. ``I`m having an awful hard time with this.'' His son, whom he raised by himself, started getting into trouble two years ago, at age 14. Robert Greene, at the time, had to be hospitalized after he suffered burns from a dental operation that went awry - improperly mixed nitrous oxide was ignited during a routine operation. And no one looked after Christopher as he recuperated, he said. In time, criminal charges started piling up, including assault with a deadly weapon. And roughly two months ago, Robert Greene said, he noticed his son wearing clothing of the same color, a sign of gang membership - red cap on sideways, a red shirt, a red bandanna on his arm. Once jailed on the burglary charges, however, the Gibbs High School sophomore was having second thoughts about his criminal activity, his father said. Before his release, he wrote a list of 19 things that were ``sad'' about incarceration, from the accommodations to the lack of freedom. ``It's sad everyone knowing you as a number,'' reads one line in the script, which was provided by his father. But Christopher Greene also looked forward to his release and on another page, vowed to make changes for the good. On the page, he quotes a Bible verse: ``Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.'' When Robert Greene woke up early Saturday and found his son's bed empty, he also found a letter from him saying Christopher had left to get out of the gang. Robert Greene says he believes the gang put his son up to the robbery and rape as part of a ritual to extricate himself from the group. |
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