Florida detective adopts boy who survived massacre of family by father
‘He knows he has a story that has been written for him, he also knows he doesn’t want to be defined by that story’
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A Florida detective who arrived at a horrific crime scene where a man had killed his girlfriend and special needs daughter and critically injured his son has adopted the boy three years later.
Mike Blair was one of the first police officers on the scene after Ronnie Oneal killed his girlfriend Kenyatta Barron, their daughter Ron’niveya, 9, and left his 8-year-old son, also called Ronnie, with stab wounds and burns.
Ronnie was flown to Tampa General Hospital in a critical condition.
"We were told there was a child being medevacked to Tampa General, but he was not expected to live," Mr Blair said in a video shared by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.
Mr Blair went to visit Ronnie in hospital a few weeks later, and the boy asked if he would stay to watch a film with him.
“I said no, I can’t. I gotta get back to work. How about I come back and watch a movie with you tonight?”
Mr Blair had already planned to have dinner with his wife Danyel that evening, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind spending time with the young boy instead.
“I had already known that I would want to take Ronnie home with us, starting that night,” she said.
The couple already had six children of their own, but when Ronnie came up for adoption five months later they volunteered to take him.
“He knows he has a story that has been written for him,” Mr Blair said of Ronnie, who is now 12.
“He also knows he doesn’t want to be defined by that story.”
Ronnie’s father was convicted of two counts of murder and one of attempted murder, and was sentenced to three life terms plus 60 years prison last week.