L.I.F.E. founder helps others
When Althea Hill Augustine found herself driving around New Iberia one night, wracked with grief over the loss of her daughter, she didn’t know what to do or, at first, where to go.
“It was about 1 in the morning,” Augustine said, “and God just took me there. I came to Mrs. Rosalind Bobb’s house and started knocking on the door, crying, in the middle of the night, and she was there.”
That night she sat with Rosalind and her husband, Taylor Bobb Jr., at their home on Breaux Alley, and together the three cried and prayed.
Over the course of several years, following her own son’s death, Rosalind Bobb had become a sort of unofficial grief counselor for much of the West End. As shootings and gun violence mounted over the past decade, grieving mothers and cousins and sons just seemed to find their way to her.
In 2015, Bobb made it more official.
Every second Thursday evening of the month, an increasing number of grieving men, women and children gather around several tables in a recreation room beside the kitchen of the West End Park Community Center, to pray and to help one another move forward, one day at a time. Rosalind Bobb named her grief support group L.I.F.E., or Life is Forever and Eternal.
“Even before the group, she was doing the work,” Augustine said. “When my daughter was murdered, in 2009, she was the first person to come to me. Without her, I don’t think I’d have gotten through this.”
“I knew her before all of that, but not like now,” Augustine said.
“Any time of the morning or the night, any time I needed anything, she was there for me. She has really been a blessing. She is doing the work,” she said. “You just need someone who knows that same pain that you are having.”
In 2006, Bobb’s son was murdered by a transient. The gunman, a New Orleans native, had committed a murder in Houston, where he’d been relocated after Hurricane Katrina, then fled to New Iberia. He hadn’t been in town long before a “beef” led to a midnight shooting that left Bobb’s son, Jamon Monty Rogers, dead. He was 18 years old.
“The grief was unimaginable,” Bobb said.
“On the day he was buried, I found out — his girlfriend told me she was pregnant. I had a grandbaby on the way,” she said. “God has blessed me.”
Bobb spent a long time focused on bringing her son’s murderer to justice, which happened when the shooter, Ricardo Irvin Sr., was given two life sentences for the murders in Houston and in New Iberia.
“He had been out on the streets of New Orleans since he was 8 years old,” Bobb said. “I asked him, in the courtroom, where was his family, and he couldn’t answer.”
Bobb said she saw a vision in her mind of a Bible sitting in the corner of a jail cell.
“I told that young man, ‘wherever they send you — Texas or Louisiana — open up your Bible. God is forgiving.’ ”
And then Bobb forgave the man, too.
“In order for me to go on and help other people, I had to,” she said. “I thank God every day that I don’t have that madness on my chest, that madness of being angry.”
As the years passed, Bobb said, she knew God had work for her to do.
“Lord, I’m ready to do your work and will,” she said.
She began informally reaching out to grieving parents.
“Everywhere I looked I was looking at mothers and fathers losing their children,” she said. “I know the pain I’ve had to deal with, and I knew if I was hurting so bad that they were hurting too. It was time for me to reach out and help other people.”
Eventually, she got with another woman, Angelle Ozenne, who helped her organize the group. While much of the focus was and remains on the surviving victims of gun violence — the still-living loved ones — the scope is broader than that.
“We’ve all had to deal with broken hearts. It’s a pain that lingers, forever,” she said.
Precious Jacobs’ lost her 5-year-old son, Ja’Vian Ma’Khi Harris, to a sudden illness. She has attended several L.I.F.E. meetings since.
“She’s amazing, what she’s doing. It is really great, it’s necessary,” said Jacobs.
Jacobs has, in turn, turned her grief into giving. She donates food and clothing to parents in need, and when hurricanes ravaged Texas and Florida this year, she used an old Chevy van to deliver hundreds of home cooked meals to displaced residents in New Iberia hotels.
She calls that work, unofficially, the Ja’Vian Congregation of Hope.
Bobb, who was born on Weeks Island but moved to New Iberia very young, is a NISH graduate, the daughter of Joseph and Delores Rogers. She works in transportation for child protective services, and her husband, Taylor Bobb Jr., is a welder.
The L.I.F.E. meetings usually have a guest speaker and a faith leader, often the Rev. James Broussard, a local pastor.
“He has been tremendous for us,” Bobb said.
“The meetings are not all sad,” she said. “We cry, but we laugh, and we sing. My cousin is a terrific singer, and she comes and sings.”
There are 9-year-olds and 80-year-olds and everyone in between.
“The holidays are when it’s really the hardest because you’re thinking of them,” Bobb said.
The group’s next meeting is at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the West End Community Center.
“I just thank God. It’s him not, me. I thank him for the strength to be able to help other people. And my husband,” she was quick to add. “Taylor Bobb Jr. He is my right hand.”
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