Early Life
Rogers was the fourth and youngest child born to Willie Wadsworth and Estella Rogers. He spent most of his childhood growing up in the McDougald Terrace housing project in Durham. His father, who left the family and moved to Texas when Rogers was a toddler, died when Rogers was eight.
Estella Rogers sustained severe head injuries and required two operations when she was nearly killed in an automobile wreck in 1988. She was in a coma for more than two weeks and remained hospitalized for three more months. Even after she returned home she still had memory loss and needed extra care. While his mother recovered, Rogers moved in with Nathaniel Brooks, who was once his youth league coach, spending his last two seasons at Hillside High School with the Brooks family.
His stepfather James Spencer, who was the only man Rogers called "Dad", died of lung cancer in February 1990. Renita, the oldest of the Rogers children, became a nurse at N.C. Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. His oldest brother Stacy, who attended the Eastern N.C. School for the Deaf in Wilson and the N.C. School for the Deaf in Morganton, won a gold medal in basketball at the 1981 XIV Deaflympics (aka "World Games for the Deaf" and "World Deaf Olympics") in Cologne, Germany. After that he worked for the Veterans Administration Hospital in Durham. Stanley, his other brother, served over 10 years (1981–1991) of a 20-year sentence for armed robbery at Central Prison in Raleigh.
Read more about this topic: Rodney Rogers
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