Mia Rodgers bled on the bed. The sheets, blankets, and the little girl’s frilly bedspread were covered in her blood. Her pink-painted, glue-on fingernails clawed at the blanket. She had been shot minutes before by her paternal grandfather, Ronald Fred Gregory. In the wee hours of March 21, he lay there next to her. Mia found the breath in her punctured lung to ask the grandfather: “Paw paw, when am I going to stop hurting?” The grandfather did nothing. He thought of himself. Mia Rodgers, 75 pounds in the third grade, bled for more than an hour before she died.
No more custody battles between her father’s family and her dead mother’s family. No more courtrooms and judges and shuttling around on weekends. This paternal grandfather, at 68, also killed his bedridden, invalid wife that morning. Barbara Gregory, shot first, was killed with the same 9 millimeter pistol that Ronald Gregory used on Mia. Gregory, who claimed that a reason for using the gun was a concern that fumes from Mia’s glue-on nails would cause his granddaughter brain damage, did not call an ambulance when the girl asked him when the hurt would stop. He just lay there in the bed. Until Monday, when Gregory pleaded guilty but mentally ill to both killings and was sentenced to life in prison, Mia’s maternal grandfather had never heard that Mia suffered for more than an hour.
“It is just unbelievable, it is sick, I don’t know how to describe it,” said Paul Rodgers, the grandfather, after court. “It is past wrong. It is ... inhumane.” In the courtroom, people gasped and sobbed when Mia’s last words were read. Rodgers gasped too. His daughter-in-law, Karen Rodgers, shook with pain and rage. Karen Rodgers and her husband, Eric, are raising Mia’s brother in Alabama. Eric is the brother of Mia’s mom, who died in November 2013 from leukemi
“She asked when the pain would stop and that man who shot her, he didn’t do a thing,” Karen Rodgers said as she walked out of the courtroom. “The pain did not stop and he did nothing. Says just about all anyone needs to know about what he is, that awful man. She suffered. Mia suffered.” The only person in that courtroom who didn’t recoil in horror about the last hour of Mia’s life was the man who shot her. Gregory stood there and said nothing. He displayed no emotion.
