COURIER PRESS

ST. LOUIS - Rodney McAllister Jr., attacked and killed by a pack of stray dogs earlier this week, was by most accounts two different children in one.

He was the bubbly, always grinning 10-year-old whom students and teachers encountered in school. Handsome and well-liked by his classmates and teachers, he couldn't stop talking, they say. Loved to talk, about anything: Malden, the town in southeast Missouri he'd left a few months ago with his mother and brother to come to St. Louis, a movie, even the T-shirt he'd worn that day.

Then there was the other Rodney, the one the neighborhood kids knew. That Rodney rarely smiled, they say, and he almost never mentioned his family.

That Rodney lived in a darker place.

He lived with his 35-year-old mother, Gladys Loman, who, according to relatives and police, had a history of drug use, and who was a fugitive in St. Louis fleeing a weapons charge in Dunklin County, Mo.

Rodney and his brother had been taken from her twice by the Missouri Department of Family Services and placed in foster homes, according to family members, but later returned to her.

That Rodney went for days wearing the same clothes, showing up at school on cold winter days without a coat or gloves and wearing shoes two sizes too big.

He lived in a homeless shelter for nearly two months when he first came to St. Louis before he moved into an old brick apartment across from Ivory Perry Park. Neighborhood children said Rodney was afraid of the dogs in the park.

After school at Clark Accelerated Academy, Rodney and his mentally retarded brother, Terry Loman, 13, often came home to find the apartment locked and their mother nowhere around, said Lance and Clint Harrison, two boys in the neighborhood who knew Rodney.

Rodney, Clint said, was rapidly becoming his best friend. They played sports together in the park and traded Pokemon cards. But Rodney was quiet and never smiled, Clint said.

When police arrived at Gladys Loman's apartment Tuesday morning to ask her about her son, she said she thought he had spent the night with Clint, as though it were a regular occurrence, police say.

But Clint, 12, Lance, 11, and their mother, Joyce Ore, said Rodney had never spent the night at their house, and Ore said she had met Rodney only once and had never met his mother.

Police Lt. Ron Henderson, commander of the homicide unit, sat in his office Wednesday still trying to come to grips with Rodney's death. He couldn't get over how the mother didn't know where her son was. "I didn't understand it," he said softly. "He's a 10-year-old child."

Even worse, he was reliving the child's gruesome death. Rodney didn't die from just being mauled, he said. He was eaten to death.

"They were feeding off this kid," Henderson said. "I've seen over 1,500 bodies but I've never, never seen anything like this. Nobody has. He suffered big time. I'll never forget it, I'll tell you that."

Henderson added: "The pathologist said the kid was alive throughout the ordeal."

Nearby neighbors told police they heard Rodney's screams but thought it was dogs fighting, Henderson said. "They closed their blinds and went on about their business," he said.

When the boy's body was found, police began to go through their missing person reports, then the public school system for absent students.

A basketball found at the scene had the name "Rodney" written on it, and there was a Rodney McAllister Jr. on the schools' absentee list. Detectives went to his apartment at about 9 a.m. Tuesday and knocked on his mother's door.

Henderson paused when he recalled that the mother didn't know the whereabouts of her son or the phone number where she thought he might have spent the night.

The last time she saw him was about 5 p.m. Monday.

Henderson said he was so infuriated that he almost lost control.

Loman was charged Tuesday with endangering the welfare of a child. She is being held on \$5,000 bail. The Division of Family Services took Rodney's brother into custody Wednesday.

Loman left Malden, a farming community, in December and landed in a homeless shelter in St. Louis. Some family members say she was running from the weapons charge, but others say she came to St. Louis seeking drug rehab.

Rodney showed up at Hamilton Elementary in St. Louis, his former school, the week in December that the area was hit with a big snowstorm. He didn't have a coat.

Lori Ward, his teacher there, got him one. Another day during recess, Rodney looked at his hands and asked Ward how much gloves cost. When Ward brought him a pair the next day, he pulled them on. "These match," he told her, sounding surprised.

"He was just a sweetheart who wanted to be loved," Ward said. "And you couldn't help but love him."

He even gave Ward a hug every day at the end of school, no matter how many times she'd had to ask him to be quiet that day.

"He came in, and he needed somebody bad," Ward said.