On Jan. 11, a small group of people gathered at a 10th Avenue South house in Columbus to watch the college football national championship game and place bets on which team would win.
Shortly before 10 p.m., six men entered the building where the party was through an unlocked door. All wore dark clothes. All wore masks. At least two were armed with guns.
The men had everyone get on their stomachs, according to Fred Shelton, interim chief police in Columbus.
“They said, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money? Where’s the money?'” Shelton said.
The intruders emptied the pockets and stole the wallets of the people at the gathering.
And at some point during the robbery, two of them shot 25-year-old Freddie Robinson in the back.
CPD received a call about the incident about 10 p.m. that night.
Freddie Robinson was transported to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle. Later, he was airlifted to North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo.
A week later, he died.
No suspects have been caught.
Why?
Phillip Morris, one of Freddie’s good friends, had planned to be at the gathering that night. He had a basketball game at Columbus High School, where he coaches basketball and teaches STEM classes, and fell asleep after getting home from the game. He never made it to the party on 10th Avenue South.
He does not know why Freddie was shot.
“Some people say it was because he didn’t have a certain amount of money,” Morris said. “They asked him did he have any more money, he said, No. Some people say he didn’t give them the money. Some people say he was kind of talking back to the guys…I really don’t know what caused him to get shot.”
CPD also doesn’t know the motive for the shooting. Shelton said it may have simply been that the robbers wanted their victims to know they were serious about their threats.
“I think they were trying to prove a point, that they mean business,” Shelton said. “I think one of the suspects said something to the nature of, ‘We mean business, let’s show these guys,’ or something of that nature.”
‘Everybody loved Freddie’
Family and friends said Freddie Robinson was sweet, friendly, always smiling, a people person. He loved being at parties and spending time with his friends and his four children.
“Everybody loved Freddie,” his mother, Margaret Robinson, told The Dispatch.
Of course, Margaret admitted with a small smile, she’s biased.
Freddie was Margaret’s only child.
She and her husband adopted him when he was 3 months old. A few weeks before they first saw him, Margaret had a dream that she gave birth to a baby. Later, she and her husband traveled to an adoption agency in Jackson to pick up their new son.
“It was the same baby that I had given birth to,” Margaret said. “I always felt like he was mine…I always told (my husband), ‘I had this baby. I gave birth to this baby’.”
Growing up, Freddie was athletic. He played football and baseball. He got a membership working at the YMCA as a teenager when Charlie Box was the director. He and Box, a Columbus councilman today, became friends during that time.
Box was impressed with Freddie because Freddie was always looking for things to do and ways to make money.
“He never wanted a free load,” Box said. “He always wanted to earn some money. That’s kind of impressive with a young person like that. They didn’t just come up there asking. I think if he could have ever got a break and got him a good job that a lot of this bad stuff that happened to him never would have happened.”
‘One of the good guys’
Both Margaret and Box admitted that Freddie sometimes fell in with the wrong crowd and got in trouble. Freddie was arrested twice for violation of probation in September 2013 and April 2014. (The Dispatch was unable to verify the circumstances of his initial arrest.)
Box said Freddie really was a “victim of circumstance.”
“I know we hear that a lot nowadays, but that’s the honest to goodness truth about him,” Box said. “He was just in the wrong place at the right time and kind of was lead into some of this stuff.”
“When you work around kids as long as I have with coaching football and peewee sports and all that, you get pretty quick to know the good guys and the phonies,” he added. “And Freddie, in my mind, was one of the good guys.”
‘God had a different plan’
Morris agreed.
He called Freddie a “motivator” who was always encouraging people, even when he himself was having hard times or getting in trouble.
It was Freddie who encouraged Morris to stay in school. Morris had been playing basketball in college with plans to pursue the sport professionally after graduation when health problems ended that goal.
“(Freddie) was the person that talked to me and just told me about having faith in God and believing in…what his plan is for you,” Morris said. “He always told me that God would set me up for something better. My dream wasn’t always the dream that God had for me…that situation ended up helping me find my career path.”
Both Morris and Freddie’s lifelong friend, Neiman Buckhalter, said that lately Freddie had been making plans to improve his life and the life of his children. He was changing bad habits and looking at the possibility of moving to Texas to get a job with a friend, Morris said.
“He just wanted a better life for himself,” Buckhalter said. “He really wanted to do something other than he was accustomed to doing. He was really trying to find his way, make a better environment and situation for his kids and for himself also.”
“I hate that he didn’t get to reach his full potential,” Morris said. “Like he told me, God had a different plan for him.”
‘I want to see justice’
Freddie’s shooters will be charged with capital murder, Shelton said. The other suspects who worked alongside them will be charged as accessories.
Margaret wants Freddie’s killers caught and brought to justice, but she says she is not interested in vengeance.
“‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,'” she said, quoting Romans 12:19.
“I want to see justice done,” Margaret said. “That’s all.”
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