Newsmakers 2017: Felice Roberson

The silence was too much for Felice Roberson. Her son, Quinton David Combs, was killed in 2015 and she couldn't understand why nobody was talking.

"I believe the silence was the betrayal. ... There were 60 people there that night," she says, describing the party where her son was shot.

"People were being very quiet. Not talking about the violence; not talking to police," she says. "We got started to be their voice."

As that voice, Roberson cried for unity, sanity and for an end to the killing. Stop Needless Acts of Violence, Please! (SNAP) started as a grieving mother's campaign for peace, but has grown over the last year and a half to provide a more holistic answer to the scars left by violent crime on the Cape Girardeau community.

"This is not a south side problem," she says. "Every [city] ward has been touched by crime, by violence. This is a community problem. That's why we should unite together. It's a community problem."

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com Felice Roberson

Prayer marches, vigils, monthly meetings, weekly prayer meetups -- it's become a full-time job for Roberson, especially since the Community Counseling Center hired her to continue her SNAP work with their help.

The CCC, she says, has been instrumental in getting a future project off the ground: a community center.

That's a way off yet, she says, but while her work with SNAP has never been easy, she's never lagged.

"It's slow," she says. "Things don't change overnight."

But things like an anonymous tip line are daily indications that SNAP's efforts aren't in vain. Roberson says every morning, there's a half-hour's worth of leads on the tip line answering machine.

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com Felice Roberson

And police have told her that in at least five previously unsolved homicides, tips from that line were partly responsible for breaks in the case.

"I'm very proud of that, very proud," she says. "And we need to do more."