ANTONIO “PACMAN” ROBERTS, 20, OCT. 19, 1984 – MAY 23, 2005
The King
The Bethel Heights kids looked up to Antonio “Pacman” Roberts. They called him the neighborhood big brother. Some called him “the king.” Even the rival Childs Park kids respected him. His funeral brought the feuding communities together. For a few months a fragile peace held, the needless deaths seemed to stop, strange cars didn’t set off warning signals, gunshots didn’t echo on residential streets. Mothers weren’t picking out caskets for their sons.
But this temporary peace did not bring Pacman – nicknamed for his voracious childhood appetite – back. He never saw his 21st birthday. His son was still fatherless. And his mother, Diane Roberts, was still suffering.
Living on
On May 23, 2005, Pacman Roberts sat in Pinellas Point Apartments, where he lived with his mother. His phone rang. He answered and stepped outside.
No one but the shooter knows what happened next. By the time police arrived, 20-year-old Pacman lay dead in the parking lot from multiple gunshot wounds. More than a year later no arrests have been made; police say they have no leads.
Pacman was just 6 when his father died in an eerily similar way. Yet Diane Roberts, 36, says her son didn’t seem to fear for his own life.
“The only fear he had was not being there for his son,” she says. “That’s a reality now.”
The proudest moment of Pacman’s short life was Dec. 11, 2004, the day Curtis “Buddy” Roberts was born. The 20-year-old father stayed home more often. If he bought a pair of shoes for himself, Buddy got a pair, too.
“You never saw a 3- or 4-month-old baby with so many shoes,” Diane Roberts says, laughing.
The baby is a toddler now. He spends a lot of time with his grandmother. Sometimes he helps to lessen her grief because she sees so much of her son within the child. She takes him places she used to go with Pacman.
But other times, for the same reason, it hurts Roberts to look at her grandson. A cock of his head, a facial expression, a word and it’s as if Pacman is in the room again. The memories come rushing back and Roberts can’t help but cry.
Then 18-month-old Buddy runs to the bathroom and darts back out, dragging a roll of toilet paper behind him. He offers up the quilted sheets, saying, “You cry, you cry.”
Ladies’ man
Alicia Diane Roberts, who goes by her middle name, gave birth to her only child shortly before she turned 16. She thought she’d be ashamed, she says, but she wasn’t. She managed to make it back to school in a month. Her network of friends and family lavished attention on Pacman, spoiling him. Her younger brothers often took their new nephew out because he was a magnet for girls.
Pacman inherited his uncles’ affection for girls. In elementary school, teachers told Roberts that Pacman never wanted his reading partner to be a boy; he wanted to sit with the girls. When Roberts took Pacman and his cousin, Forbes “P-nut” Swisher, to the mall, the cocky adolescents loved to walk right up to a crowd of girls, pull a couple into their arms and start talking. Once she heard them say, “Y’all, do you know who we are?”
She laughs now, remembering: “And I’m looking at them like, ‘Who the hell are you?’ ”
Despite their three-year age difference, the cousins became close as brothers. They chattered about girls nonstop. When they were still too young to drive, they’d ride their bikes across town to visit a girl. They made sure they looked perfect. Friends and relatives say both young men were more open and expressive than most people. They were smart and loved goofing around and being the center of attention.
“Every time you turned around they’d be having birthdays. No one had more birthdays than Pacman and P-nut,” Roberts says. “Three times a year they’d be getting presents.”
It never mattered to the boys that they were both born in October. It could be the middle of the summer, but if there was a new girl in the picture, it was time to celebrate a birthday. One of the girls approached Roberts at Pacman’s funeral in late May and told her, “He fooled me because he just had me buy him a birthday present in April.”
Roberts could only smile; that was her son.
“We got lots of girls. Pacman was the best at getting the ladies,” says friend Martez “Tez” Green, 18.
Pacman became the one the younger neighborhood boys wanted to grow up to be. He had spent time in a boot camp for stealing cars, but the four months away, and the birth of his son, seemed to straighten him out.
He finished classes at Northeast High School in December 2003 and walked in graduation the next spring. He enrolled at St. Petersburg College to study business education. He hoped to one day open his own business and employ young kids to get them off the street. He joined the Brother to Brother Program, which takes members to four-year schools such as Bethune-Cookman College, Howard University and Florida State University. The trips give members a feel for the college experience and help them prepare for four-year programs.
Pacman never got the chance.
On the field
Pacman fell in love with the game of football when he was 8, and dragged his mother with him. Roberts still coaches cheerleading for the youth football league, but she got her introduction to football as a typical nervous mother.
Her son – an excellent runner – had taken off down the field with the ball, headed for the end zone. He disappeared beneath a pile of boys.
Roberts shot up in the stands yelling, “Get off him! Get off him! He’s too skinny!”
The coach turned around and said, “That’s part of the game.”
“I know but he’s too little,” she exclaimed.
The other parents in the stands gave Roberts “the new parent look.”
Pacman returned to the sidelines and leaned over the benches, whispering to her, “Mom, I’m all right. Can you stop embarrassing me?”
As Pacman grew older he still attended the games where his mother coached cheerleading. If an angry parent disagreed with Robert’s decision to sit their child out to discipline them, Pacman hovered close by to make sure his mother was respected.
When Pacman was younger, he and Roberts were constant companions. They’d go out to dinner or watch television or wrestle on the floor. Those evenings together were fewer as Pacman grew into a restless young man. But once, when he was 18, he turned to her and said, “I wish I could just go to Chuck E. Cheese’s.”
So Roberts took her son to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
The grief is fresh
Roberts sits on her mother’s porch this steamy Fourth of July as family members trail in and out of the house. Her arms and legs are covered in tattoos honoring her son. A picture of mother and son is emblazoned on a T-shirt across her chest. Holidays make her reflective. She plans on visiting Pacman’s grave later in the day. It’s been more than a year, but she says: “It’s still hell. I’m being honest.”
It took her over four months after his death to go back to her job as a nursing assistant. Some days she still can’t make it to work. Then another blow: P-nut was the next to be killed.
“It made everything with Pacman fresh all over again,” she says.
Roberts calls and visits with P-nut’s mother, Denise Swisher, often. They spend hours talking about the experience no one wants to share – losing a child.
“Diane’s one of the strongest people I know,” Swisher says. “I’m not that strong.”
Roberts reminds her things aren’t always what they seem.
“I hold a lot inside and I don’t let it show to people,” she confesses.
She prefers to cry alone in her apartment looking at Pacman’s picture.
Roberts had always promised her son, who loved to celebrate and bask in the glow of attention, that he could throw the biggest party he wanted for his 21st birthday. And when that day came, last Oct. 19, relatives and friends gathered without him. There were many tears, and P-nut came up to Roberts and said, “It’s not the same. I don’t have anybody to run around with and talk to everyone with.”
Now both are gone.
“Some days, it seems without them, there’s no party,” Roberts says.
NAVIGATION:
Introduction
Part 1: Antonio “Pacman” Roberts
Part 2: Forbes “P-nut” Swisher
Part 3: Michael “Mike-Mike” Kerry Smith III
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