June 1, 2009

“So beautiful, so genuine and so happy.” That’s how Anthony Robertson describes his nephew of Antonio Robertson.

He was “named after me, my namesake, so I’m very close to him.”

Thirty-year old Antonio had lived here in the Valley since he was a child and attended Maryvale High School.

He had three children of his own and a ton of friends. “He enjoyed people. That’s why had so many friends. He was such a friendly type person and he took a lot of people in and helped them with clothes and if they needed food. He had that type of personality.”

You hear it a lot. He’d give the shirt off his back if you needed it. but for antonio it was true. he really would. anthony says his nephew never met a stranger. “He always had his camera. He was always taking photographs of people and that’s one of the hobbies he had was taking pictures.”

It was the middle of the afternoon, July 3rd, 2008. A terrible scene has unfolded in an apartment near 15th Avenue and Peoria. “Antonio’s ex-girlfriend had gone to visit him. When she walked into the apartment she found him shot to death,” says Detective Icela Brown with the Phoenix Police Department.

She says Antonio was discovered in his bedroom. “The detectives believe that he had been deceased for about 12 hours.”

And it looks like the person who shot Antonio was someone he’d allowed into his home. “The mystery of this entire case is that the doors to the apartment were secure. There was a back bedroom that had been broken.”

But detectives don’t believe anyone came in through it.

“We got so many calls and so many letters from people that said how he had touched their lives by just being friendly and just being open, that they couldn’t believe that somebody would do such a thing, but that he was such a giving and nice person. And one thing they would always remember – everybody said the same thing – was his smile, that he always had a smile for you. The first thing he would do is smile and if he had a camera he wanted to take a picture.”