Va. Teen's Drowning Bewilders Mother

In Woodbridge, Gloria Elena Rodriguez cries on the shoulder of friend Karla Azzolini. Behind them is Rodriguez's husband, Gilton Acosta. Rodger Rodriguez "tried to help everyone. This was the problem," Acosta said. (By Carol Guzy -- The Washington Post)

She left Rodger, then 11, with her three daughters, the eldest of whom was 21. Although the girls seemed to cope, Rodger seemed to ache for his mother, talking to her nearly every day.

"He couldn't be without me," Rodriguez said.

Last year, she arranged for a smuggler to bring Rodger across the Mexican border, accompanied by her husband's 26-year-old sister, Sarai Acosta, a factory worker. Rodger was arrested and given a summons to appear in immigration court but ignored it and flew to Miami. Rodriguez flew to pick up the boy she hadn't seen in three years -- and found a tall young man, on the brink of 15.

"He said, 'Mama, I'm never going to leave you,' " she said, breaking into a smile.

But once in Virginia, Rodger began to have difficulties, his mother said. He enrolled at Gar-Field High School but cut class constantly to hang around with pals. His mother, busy working in a restaurant, discovered how bad the situation was only when he was expelled.

Then, this past summer, the family was unable to renew the lease on its apartment, Rodriguez's husband said, because "we had no papers." Meanwhile, Sarai Acosta learned she had cancer and had moved in with them.

They managed to rent the bottom floor of the split-level on Kurtz Road, in a slightly frayed middle-class neighborhood of big, green yards. Within days of moving in, Sarai died.

And then Rodger was arrested.

He had been slipping further from his mother's grip, the handsome young man who was always with friends, dancing, flirting. She said she tried to discipline him, throwing away the baggy jeans he bought to fit in with the tough young teenagers at school, taking away his cellphone. But she found it hard to crack down on the loving son she had longed to see for years.

"I felt bad that he didn't have his cellphone," she said.

The arrest, though, was serious. Rodger was with a friend who was driving a stolen car, and they tried to flee police, his stepfather said. Rodger was jailed for several weeks and then released on parole, his family said.

"He didn't think before doing things," his stepfather said.