ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701170099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK, TODD JACKSON AND RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITERS
HER HUSBAND was beaten to death; her son, 8, is charged with murder; her attorney says she worries that police doubt her word.
The mother of an 8-year-old boy charged with killing her husband believes police have questions about whether she is telling the whole truth, said a Roanoke lawyer she hired this week.
Frances Rosser - whose son was charged with murder Tuesday, almost a month after police found the beaten body of his stepfather in their Pittsylvania County home - is being represented by Ray Ferris.
"She has some concerns, and I'm advising her relative to those concerns," Ferris said. Rosser hired Ferris to advise her, not to represent her son.
"It is her perception that the investigators have indicated that they do not believe that she is being truthful with them."
Ferris confirmed that his client's discussions with police have been about the death of her husband, Bernard R. Rosser Jr., a 55-year-old Franklin County parole and probation officer who was found beaten to death Dec. 19 in their Gretna home.
Ferris declined to elaborate, except to say that Rosser is holding up emotionally as well as can be expected.
"She's extremely distraught that's she lost her husband and now her son is accused of the killing," Ferris said.
The 8-year-old, who has a different last name, is not being identified. A source said Thursday that he is being held in a Danville juvenile detention home.
Pittsylvania County authorities, including Commonwealth's Attorney David Grimes and Sheriff Harold Plaster, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Bernard Rosser died of multiple blows to the head. His supervisor called the Franklin County Sheriff's Office after he failed to show up for work or to respond to pages on the day his body was found. No one was at the house when police arrived.
Neighbors describe Rosser's stepson as a heavyset boy, big for his age.
Ellen Brooks, an insurance agent in Gretna, said Thursday that the boy acted up often when he was in a second-grade class last year with her daughter at Gretna Elementary.
``My daughter would come home and say things about how he had acted and what he had done at school," Brooks said.
When Brooks went on a field trip with her daughter's class, she recalled that the boy was unruly. "He had gotten out in the street. He didn't want to listen to anything you said. He wouldn't obey," she said.
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