Raelyn and Steven Rowe threw their arms around each other Thursday after a judge sent their 20-year-old son’s killer to prison for life.
After nearly three years, Erron Coleman, 27, admitted he pulled the trigger on Daniel Rowe on July 22, 2015.
The sentence ended a 35-month-long saga of uncertainty and anguish for the Rowe family.
The Sunday before the sentencing, Raelyn Rowe slouched into her armchair and lit a Marlboro in her Orange Park home.
“None of us are the people we were before this happened,” Raelyn Rowe said.
She added Thursday, “I am a lesser person now.”
The afternoon before his sentencing, Coleman’s fiancé, Ashley Jackson, 26, said she was positive his accomplice, Devonte Hanford, pulled the trigger, not Coleman. Hanford and Coleman fled the scene of Daniel Rowe’s murder together, with the $4 they lifted from his wallet.
Still, bail was not on the table for Coleman, whose attorney called five witnesses to speak on his behalf Thursday. They said he was an ambitious man, that he wanted to better himself after spending years among violence and instability in Detroit.
Raelyn Rowe shook her head, squeezed her husband’s right hand and sobbed harder when Coleman, a felon with a record of convictions reaching double digits, added he wanted to be a chef, which her son had been training to do.
None of the defense witnesses’ testimony swayed Judge Mark Borello, who said his decision to remove Coleman from society without parole was “not even a close call.”
Just over a week earlier, Borello sentenced Hanford to 20.7 years in jail.
Raelyn Rowe said Coleman’s sentencing still meant more.
Before the judge announced his decision Thursday, 19 people held hands and prayed for justice for the fallen father, brother, son, grandson, nephew and friend. Raelyn Rowe stood somberly, head bowed.
Her husband, Steven Rowe, spent the Sunday morning before the sentencing in tears. For the third Father’s Day in a row, his son wouldn’t hug him or make him blueberry milkshakes.
Sunday was an emotional day, Steven Rowe said, as an electric lantern spilled dim light into his living room.
Daniel Rowe’s sister, Hannah, 21, said she had a hard time at work that day. As orders for Father’s Day meals rolled in, she drowned in reminders that her brother wouldn’t be topping pizzas or stir-frying chicken with his family.
The family wanted him back. In lieu of the impossible, they wanted answers, a conclusion.
Sunday morning in the Miami area, Daniel Rowe’s fiancé, Britney Rowin, baked and iced an eight-pack of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with her two daughters, one who is Daniel Rowe’s child and one he’d planned to adopt.
Rowin said she tries to stay strong for her girls and for herself, but none of them handle her fiancé’s death well. She isolates herself; her 7-year-old Colby wakes up screaming for him.
Steven Rowe said whenever the 7-year-old visits, the first place she wants to go is Daniel Rowe’s grave.
“There was no escape at all, there’s still no escape,” Rowin said.
She and the girls planned to make BLTs for Father’s Day lunch and eat lots of treats. Daniel Rowe was a culinarian, after all, a fry-cook training to join the sauté line at the Blind Rabbit in Riverside.
The restaurant was less than a one-minute walk from Coleman’s listed address, where he and Hanford reportedly dashed after shooting Daniel Rowe twice in the back of the head while he took out the trash.
Steven Rowe folded his hands across his chest in an olive-green lounger the Sunday before Coleman’s sentencing, remembering what his son looked like lying there, blood streaming from his eyes. He worked across the street from his son and was there within minutes.
He said Thursday he’d “never felt so useless.”
He telephoned his wife that July night at 10:06 p.m. Collin Minch, who holds Daniel Rowe as a brother, zipped to the hospital with a pack of cigarettes, bottles of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper, chip bags and snack cakes.
Paramedics revived Daniel Rowe twice in the ambulance, but he died at the hospital just after midnight, his family said.
The family opted not to resuscitate him.
To this day, they say they don’t have the whole story.
Jackson said she’s not sure of the story, either.
Meanwhile, Rowes, determined but exhausted, trudge on.
Raelyn and Steven Rowe said they attended around 50 hearings in the past two years, sometimes multiple times per week. The couple was usually joined by family members, including Steven Rowe’s sister and father.
Raelyn Rowe said she and her husband have no vacation or sick days left. They’d crammed meals and trips around hearings. She said she only scheduled her 50th-birthday celebration after marking her calendar with upcoming court dates.
“It drains your soul,” her husband said.
Still, family members kept their promise to breathe life into their voiceless son. They’ve kept their promise to stay together, mostly through “pure stubbornness,” Raelyn Rowe said.
The Rowe family was in court Monday morning when Borello finalized Coleman’s sentencing date. Raelyn Rowe was one of the first out of the courtroom, eyes puffy and lips clenched. Coleman has been in jail since July 2016 and pleaded guilty in the second-degree murder a year later.
The family’s quest for punishment and justice finally came Thursday.
Soon, the family might even have some time to finally grieve.
“We still haven’t actually done that yet,” Steven Rowe said Sunday. He was calm, anticipating the end of a chapter of his life that ripped him apart.
Hannah Rowe said Thursday the family planned to visit her brother’s grave after Borello handed down the sentence. They’d bring flowers in Daniel Rowe’s favorite colors, purple and green, and release balloons into the sky like they’d done a year after he died.
The Rowe family filed out of the courtroom Thursday to visit the grave, tears of relief tracking across their faces, Raelyn Rowe’s hand on her heart.
Click here to read the Florida Times-Union article.
