2.Joseph Rogers — Direct

JOSEPH ROGERS: Joseph Rogers, R-O-G-E-R-S.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Good morning.

JOSEPH ROGERS: I'll be 59 in July.

JOSEPH ROGERS: For the Massachusetts Office of Attorney General.

JOSEPH ROGERS: I'm an assistant attorney general.

JOSEPH ROGERS: For a little over 22 years.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Kelley.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, we -- I moved in in 1992, and we got married in 1993.

JOSEPH ROGERS: He was probably about six years old.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Six. Kelley has four children and I have two. We all lived together. It was sort of a Brady Bunch situation.

JOSEPH ROGERS: The oldest is Nicole, then my son Robert, then the redheaded Jennifer, the brown-haired Jennifer, and Sean and Andy.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, he was sort of difficult at first and over the years he viewed me less as a bad guy, and at the end we were very close. He used to come to the football games with me. I have season tickets for the Patriots, and he used to love going to the football games. And that year was the first year -- he actually had been working. And I have four season tickets with a friend of mine, and Sean wanted to buy more than a couple of games. He bought one of the seats. And he also bought a pickup truck because he wanted to be the person that drove to the tailgate. And he never had the opportunity to use those tickets.

JOSEPH ROGERS: He was very -- things were right or wrong. When -- with six children, things get broken, and nobody saw anything.

JOSEPH ROGERS: But you could always look at Sean and he would sort of spill the beans, so... He would tell us when other children were acting out. I don't think he was, perhaps, their favorite at all times. He used to tell us about how the brown-haired Jennifer used to leave to go to high school in one set of clothes and change in the bathroom to something we wouldn't like.

JOSEPH ROGERS: So he was a cop at an early age.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Very noisy. And I think -- you know, everybody got along sort of amazingly well. And I think we were a very close family until his death.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Excuse me?

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes. We -- I used to go on at least one cruise or some type of large family vacation a year. And you just saw the picture of the kids, but my wife's family would also be there, her parents and my mother and aunts and uncles. So it was a large group of people on those cruises.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. I mean, you almost have to rent a hall. There are quite a number of people. My wife has three brothers and sisters, and one of the sisters has five children, so it can get a little crowded. And the extended family was always there as well.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Ever since I can remember. You know, he was always chasing Andy around. Andy was always the bad guy and he was always the police officer. He used to make siren sounds, or when he was -- we were driving down the interstate and he was in the car, he saw somebody pulled over at the side of the road, he would start singing the theme song to the TV series Cops, so. "Bad boys."

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah, he loved flags. I remember him giving me a hard time once on a -- I don't remember if it was Memorial Day or Fourth of July -- because I didn't hang up the flag. But he was very into flags and he had them in his room. And he liked the flag.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Just once. After -- the first time the Red Sox won the World Series, they had the duck boat parade and somehow he ended up at some party. And he was down -- he was underage. He was downstairs drinking a beer and there was a riot breaking out upstairs, so the Boston police showed up and they told him to get rid of the beer and stay there. And he did exactly that. Most kids, including myself, as soon as the cop disappeared to go upstairs, we would have disappeared too. I was reading the police report and I thought maybe I raised the kid wrong.

JOSEPH ROGERS: But he was charged with minor in possession of alcohol. And he told his mother on the way home that God probably did this so that he could understand what it was like to be arrested.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes. He went to Salem State and graduated with a degree in criminal justice. He went to the part-time police academy, and that was good enough to get you a summer job in Hull. He also was a volunteer for the Somerville Auxiliary Police. He obtained the rank of sergeant in the auxiliary police and was the youngest sergeant they had ever had. He -- after he graduated from college, since they knew him at Somerville, they liked him, he was able to get a job as a clerk at the police station. And while he was working as a clerk in the police station, they sponsored him to the MBTA Transit Police Academy. We had to pay his way through the academy but they would -- they sponsored him so he could attend. In 2010, he graduated from the MBTA Police Academy. And at that time he had the highest grade point average of anybody who had ever graduated from the police academy -- that police academy.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah, he had a lot of friends. And I've gotten to know some of them a little better after he died. I'm kind of proud of the friends that he hung out with.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. When he was working, he would go through the labs at night. That was one of his jobs. But he would actually stop and talk to people and talk to the students about what they were doing. They worked kind of crazy hours. So he developed a relationship with these children -- young adults, and he was very popular among them simply because nobody had ever talked to them before. And some of them come from places where police officers are sort of an arm of the central government, and he got them accustomed to, We don't necessarily do things here like that. And he had a lot of friends on their volunteer ambulance that they have, he also was a part of the MIT Outing Club which used to do hikes and climb Mt. Washington and things like that. I mean, he was only a couple of years older than most of the graduate students, which is who he tended to hang out with.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. He never really told us this. He said he was working, and his idea of work wasn't necessarily going and punching a clock. Somerville has a boxing club that's designed for, I guess, at-risk kids, to teach them -- get them off the streets and teach them boxing. He used to volunteer there all time. And the auxiliary is a volunteer too. He didn't get paid for any of that. But he would go around and sort of just help out people. I remember there was a time, he must have been in college, he was leaving and the little girl across the street who was probably about ten or 12 at the time had fallen off her bicycle and she was bleeding, and he carried her home and made sure her parents took care of her, and then he went back and got the bicycle. He would do things like that for people.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. I probably shouldn't tell you with the chief in the room, but it bothered him that there were so many homeless in Cambridge, and most of them are mentally ill or alcoholics. So that was part of the job that he didn't really like. And one night he found somebody -- it was in the winter -- they were sleeping on a steam grate, so the steam was coming up and the person was soaking wet. And he knew if he moved him along he would freeze to death. So he pointed to a building and said, "Go in there. The door is open. Go down in the basement. You better get out of here by nine o'clock in the morning." So he really wasn't supposed to do that, but that's the type of things that he would do.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. They didn't really fight, just he used to torture Andy until Andy became bigger than he was, and that ended, so...

JOSEPH ROGERS: Sure.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes, they are.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes. That picture was taken back around '92-'93, when we first moved in.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. Starting on the bottom row to the left, that's Jennifer, the brown-haired one; Andy; above him is Sean; and then the other redheaded Jennifer; then above her, Robert; and off to the far right is Nicole.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That was at Nicole's wedding in about 2005. And Sean and Andy are on the -- first Sean is next to Brendan, the groom, and then Andy's on the end.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That's a picture of Sean with the MIT Outing Club.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Just a bunch of kids that wanted to go camp and hike in the woods. And they were all very close. And it just -- it couldn't have been more than two weeks before he died, he had gone up to Nova Scotia with them.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That's in the Foxboro, the Patriots parking lot.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Robert's on the left, then comes Sean, myself, and brown-haired Jennifer's on the right.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: No, that was earlier. He never got to use the pickup truck at a game.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That's Sean with Jennifer, brown-haired Jennifer.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: He told me that if he had to sit next to her one more game, he wouldn't go because she wouldn't shut up the whole game.

JOSEPH ROGERS: This is a picture of red-haired Jennifer's wedding in 2010. Sean had just graduated from the police academy at this point.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Starting from the left is brown-haired Jennifer, Sean, red-haired Jennifer, Andy and Robert.

JOSEPH ROGERS: This was the graduation from the MBTA Transit Police Academy. That's my wife pinning his badge on him. It was held at Faneuil Hall.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That was probably the happiest day of his life.

JOSEPH ROGERS: That's Sean in the MIT police car with this little boy who wanted to -- his mom asked Sean if he could sit in the car so she could take a picture. So he was very excited. And Sean put the hat on him so she could, you know, give him a thrill.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, we were at home. We got a call around 11:30 at night. And my wife picked up the phone and she started screaming and she gave me the phone. And on the other end was Chief DiFava. And he told me that Sean had been shot and he was at Mass. General and that they were sending a Wilmington Police Officer to pick him up -- pick us up. So they came, and we went down to Mass. General Hospital and --

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, we pulled down the street and there was cops all over the place. And they put us in this room and we -- my wife had called the children, so one by one they all showed up and -- except for Andy, who was in Charlotte. And then the doctor and Deputy Chief Perault came in to tell us that he was dead.

JOSEPH ROGERS: It was rather devastating. I mean, sometimes it still feels like it's a dream. And then they took us to see Sean. And, you know, the jury saw the pictures of what he looks like. He had a hole in the middle of his head and he was shot to pieces. And he's laying there. They don't really clean you up much; they just wipe off the blood. And my wife is touching him and his blood is coming up in her hands. And so we got to see him there. And --

JOSEPH ROGERS: No; all the children were with us.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes. Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: There was -- no. There were a couple stationed outside, but they had a room where there were 20 or 30 police officers that we went to visit after we saw Sean. And it was people from the academy, people from Somerville and MIT, and just cops that he knew.

JOSEPH ROGERS: They were crying and very upset. I never saw a group of people that upset.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, everybody's sort of been affected. My wife is probably the worse. She's been diagnosed with having posttraumatic stress disorder. She keeps remembering that night and being told, what he looked like, and it runs over in her mind. She used to be the site administrator for Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, the Concord site, and she was responsible for everybody except the doctors.

JOSEPH ROGERS: About 130 people plus the building.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes.

JOSEPH ROGERS: She hasn't really been able -- she tried to go back to work a couple of times but she hasn't really been able to. Each of the children have been impacted. Some of them are rather depressed. And they've all had this -- I mean, it's been a terrible two years.

JOSEPH ROGERS: She was despondent. It took her a couple of months just to be able to get out of bed. I mean, when a police officer dies, especially like this, you lose sort of control. The state police have a contingent of officers who arrange for the funeral, so they're in charge. And, you know, given the circumstances, it was better that they were in charge. So you lose something. And it becomes much more public.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yeah. She's better than she was but, you know, the 18th, Saturday night, was the two-year anniversary, so she spent the weekend crying, so...

JOSEPH ROGERS: She was very strong. I mean, she only had an associate's degree in college and she was running this whole medical facility.

JOSEPH ROGERS: She was a happy person. She was a good mother and she loved her children very much.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Excuse me?

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes. It's -- she's very scared of anything that may happen to any of the other children. This is not her first child that died. She had a baby that lived for about a day or two, and then that baby died. And she told me once that if that baby had survived, she wouldn't have gotten pregnant so soon. And that next pregnancy was Sean, so Sean was a little special in that he brought her out of the depression from losing Crystal, the daughter. They're buried together up in Peabody.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, Jennifer's very depressed. And she used to hang out with Sean. They're a year apart and they were both single. And Jennifer liked his friends, and so she's lost that whole part of her life.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Nicole refuses to talk about it. She's moved to Texas and that way it's easier for her not to talk about it, but she doesn't want to talk about it.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Robert's a bit the same way. He -- there's a memorial being built at MIT that he did, and I think that helped him a lot. But he doesn't talk much either.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Jennifer has had to deal with a lot of the press, the unending press that we get, and that's been very difficult on her and her marriage. And, you know, it just wears you down after a while.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Well, I just feel beat down after two years of this.

JOSEPH ROGERS: Yes, we still -- it's difficult now with Nicole in Texas, but -- and she has three children. But, yes, we try to get together. But, you know, there's somebody missing so, you know, Thanksgiving, Christmas will never be the same. And in some respects it's sad because he's not there. And he was always a bit of a goof. He'd show up late with a cup of Dunkin' Donuts and make jokes, and that's all gone. And Easter is terrible because he was killed a week or so -- and that's when most of us -- that's the last time most of us saw him.