Year later, unsolved Chesapeake killing haunts family, friends

CHESAPEAKE

Bobby Whiting liked video games and samurai swords. He read science fiction and wanted to learn Japanese. He was a smoker, preferred Marlboro Menthol Lights but sometimes bought the cheaper brands.

At 20, he didn’t have a job or a driver’s license – the prospect of getting behind the wheel was too overwhelming for him – so he’d ride his skateboard around or ask his roommate for a lift.

Bobby Whiting never finished high school. He thought about it. He thought about going to school to be a game programmer. He thought about joining the Marines.

He lived, said roommate Bryan Foster, “in his own little world. He was unremarkable in his personal life. But we still miss him.”

Bobby Whiting was shot less than two blocks from his home on Dunedin Court in Western Branch around 8 p.m. Jan. 10, 2008. It was a nice evening; Whiting had taken his skateboard to the nearby 7-Eleven for cigarettes. He had two packs in his pocket when he died, Foster said, along with a lighter and 57 cents.

The case is still unsolved.

Bobby’s death was the first of 14 homicides in Chesapeake last year. Police have made arrests in six of those cases.

Seven days after Bobby was killed, Detective Jarrod Shivers of the Chesapeake Police Department was killed during a drug investigation in South Norfolk. Twenty-nine-year-old Ryan Frederick will stand trial in that case later this month.

Police have released no new details in Bobby’s death. Dorienne Boykin, department spokeswoman, said detectives continue to investigate. 

Bobby had already gone out once before that evening. He was back within minutes, Foster said. Didn't have enough money. He went out again with more cash.

Foster noticed the second trip was taking much longer than the first. He walked outside and saw the flashing lights.

Barbara Whiting, a nurse at Naval Medical Center, was at her home in Suffolk when Foster called that evening almost one year ago with news of her son.

Bobby was killed, he told her. She began to scream. Couldn't wrap her mind around it. Refused to accept it. She wanted to go to the hospital to see him.

Just wait, friends and neighbors who came over to comfort her, said.

A police officer knocked on her door around 1:30 a.m., Barbara said. She remembers him saying something about a crime.

Are you telling me my son is dead? Barbara asked.

He said yes.

She wanted to know if Bobby had suffered.

No, the officer said.

Bobby's mother and father, Michael Whiting, had been married five years when they adopted him at birth.

He was born perfect, Barbara said: "He was this plump, cute little baby."

But at three weeks old, he developed an infection that nearly killed him. As a dinosaur-loving toddler, he looked down at his scars and called them pterodactyls.

Barbara thought he was brilliant.

School bored Bobby almost from the beginning. He didn't like being in the classroom unless he was in charge, Barbara said, and he'd read to the other kids in elementary school.

Doctors diagnosed Whiting with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which seemed to worsen at age 10 when his parents split, his mother said. He went to a behavioral school for six months before dropping out at 17.

"He was bored," neighbor Katrina Johnston said. "When they're bored, they find ways to entertain themselves. He was a good kid. And a very good big brother."

Bobby would spend the day shooting water guns with younger brother Brandon, now 13.

"I was hoping," Barbara said, "he would find his own way one day."

There were so many things to do. Things a parent never thinks about: planning a funeral service, picking out a casket, purchasing a grave plot.

Barbara could not contain her grief at first; when she saw his case featured on television she ran out of the house and screamed. She did not watch the news again for months. "It's the same story over and over again," she said.

She traded her contacts for glasses because she cried so much.

But the tears are coming less often these days.

"I need to get back to contacts," she said in her Suffolk home this week where pictures of Bobby sprinkle the living room.

He is a child in all of them: Wearing a shiny blue cap and gown at kindergarten graduation; sitting on an upsidedown bucket with a fishing pole in his hand and a straw hat on his head; standing behind his younger brother.

The saddest part, Barbara said, is that Brandon will keep getting older but Bobby won't.

His memory cards are on a table by the front door, beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Barbara and Foster both believe someone knows who pulled the trigger that nice January evening. At least $2,000 is being offered for information leading to the killer's arrest through Crime Line and an account set up at SunTrust Banks.

"We need someone to step up with that extra piece that will complete the puzzle," Foster said. "This happened in our neighborhood. It was probably someone in our neighborhood. Kids talk. Somebody knows something."

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com