2 years after brother's slaying, W. Phila. man is gunned down

WHEN AARON Rogers' little brother, Tremaine, was murdered as they played basketball outside their Overbrook house in 2013, his world was broken.

"My brother is all that I had," he told the Daily News. "Ninety percent of me is gone now."

This week, someone took the rest of him.

A gunman shot Aaron, 20, in the face about 6 p.m. Wednesday outside Vincent's Pizza at 65th Street near Lansdowne Avenue, police said.

He died 24 hours later at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania - the city's 16th homicide victim of the new year. No arrests had been made as of last night.

Like his brother's slaying two years earlier a block away, Rogers' death didn't make headlines. Protesters didn't call for the arrest of his killer and nobody tried to make sense of his slaying.

Last night, Aaron's friends and family held a candlelight vigil for him, just as so many others will do for their loved ones who will be slain on Philadelphia's streets this year.

Alexis Pierce, 18, who organized Aaron's vigil and called him a friend for 10 years, said Aaron never forgave himself for his brother's death.

"Every day he reminded himself that 'It should have been me instead of him,' " Pierce said. "But at the end of the day, it shouldn't be either one of them."

The Daily News had profiled Tremaine Rogers, 17, in a 2013 report about eight local men whose murders were largely ignored in light of the national uproar over the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.

Aaron, then just 19, was grateful when the Daily News knocked on his foster mother's door. He was home alone at the time, but invited a reporter in so he could share his brother's story. Aaron didn't understand why Tremaine's slaying had gone seemingly unnoticed while Zimmerman's case reigned on the nightly news.

"I feel like people don't understand. It's black-on-black, but they're worried about white-on-black," Aaron said.

The two brothers, who grew up together in foster care, did not lead an easy life. Aaron couldn't remember when they'd entered the foster-care system; he just knew it had "been a long time."

When Aaron was 15 and Tremaine 13, the two got picked up in Southwest Philadelphia on a gun charge and spent serious time in a juvenile-detention facility.

But through it all, they had each other - and their foster-care mother, Patricia Thomas.

"He loved his little brother," Thomas said of Aaron yesterday. "It was always them two.' "

While the boys were playing basketball with friends outside Thomas' house on 64th Street near Lansdowne Avenue in broad daylight on July 13, 2013, two men - whom none in the group knew "from a can of peas," Aaron said - walked up and opened fire, killing Tremaine.

As much as anyone could ever gather, the shooting may have been in retaliation for a verbal argument that the boys' friends had with one of the gunmen's "cousins" earlier that day.

Two men were arrested in Tremaine's slaying and are awaiting trial for murder in March.

After Tremaine died, Aaron's world became a shrine to the brother whom he affectionately called Tree.

"If you come in here and look at his room now, Aaron's whole dresser is full of Tremaine's medals and obituaries," Thomas said. "He kept everything, including his clothes.

"If I'm not mistaken, he may have had Tremaine's gray jacket on when he was shot," she said.

Pierce, Aaron's friend, said that although Tremaine was not Aaron's only sibling, he was his closest.

"He looked at Tremaine as a son, a best friend, everything all in one," she said. "He punished himself for Tremaine's death."

Aaron's Twitter account is full of pictures of his lost brother and notes to him, like this one from Jan. 9:

"Only if heaven had visiting hours," Aaron wrote. "I'll be first in line to see you tree and pop pop."

After Tremaine's death, Thomas said Aaron began behaving out of character.

"He took it hard and then he just started acting like he didn't care," she said.

In September 2013, Rogers was arrested for aggravated assault and spent a year in prison. He had just come home and was trying to get a job, but was unsuccessful because of his new criminal record, Thomas said.

But Rogers was going to keep trying and was even slated to start classes at the Community College of Philadelphia in February, Thomas said. He also was coaching Thomas' grandson's basketball team at St. Rose of Lima School, she said.

Aaron's birth mother, Lauren Rogers, said she still had not processed Tremaine's death, and now wonders how she will get through Aaron's.

But she knows how her boys would want to spend eternity.

"They had a bond, they were always together," she said. "So we want them in the same cemetery, we want to bury them together."

As for Thomas, she now has lost three of her own sons and two foster sons to gun violence on the streets of Philadelphia.

"I think I need to take my last son and my grandson and just get on a train and go," she said. "All of our young men are dying to violence, and you think about 'Where do these kids get these guns from and how do they sleep after they just pulled out a gun and shot somebody?'

"When is it going to stop?" she asked. "Is it ever going to stop?"

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