Friends, family remember machete attack victim

Frontiersman

PALMER — The wind blowing outside the Saturday funeral for Christopher Erin Rogers Sr. seemed a less extreme incarnation of the gusts that lashed the Mat-Su Valley the day he died.

The wind blew hard and fierce until the day they cleaned up the house where Rogers died, said James Moren, son of Rogers’ fiancé Elann Moren.

“That’s when I made my peace with him,” he said.

On Dec. 2, Rogers was killed with a machete, allegedly at the hands of his son, Christopher Erin Rogers Jr., who also attacked Elann Moren as the couple slept in their Palmer home. Rogers Jr. allegedly went on to shoot three people in Anchorage, killing one, before he was finally arrested and ending a 26-hour rampage that left two people dead and three seriously wounded.

Less than two months removed from the attacks, friends and family gathered at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Palmer to speak about Chris (as he was known to friends and family), who was remembered as someone who loved the outdoors and was always willing to help his friends.

Nearly every speaker told of roofs Rogers helped patch or construct or cars he put back together.

Andy Stolen said he knew Chris since he was 10 years old. Chris was the best man at Stolen’s wedding. Prior to the service, Chris told Stolen he couldn’t make it. So, Stolen enlisted another friend.

“Right before we were going to start here comes Chris walking in, wearing a suit and tie. So I had two best men,” Stolen said.

It was a prank, and not the first — or the last — Rogers would pull. Stolen said he also pulled a few of his own on his friend.

Stolen and Rogers lived together on Stolen’s land in Willow for a couple of years. When Stolen went back to Anchorage, Chris would stop in — unannounced but always welcome — every four or five months.

Stolen said he didn’t know until after his longtime friend had died that Chris had been engaged.

Elann Moren wasn’t surprised to hear that.

“We must have known we had so little time,” she told Stolen. “We spent all of our time together.”

Moren recalled the day she reconnected with Chris at a prayer meeting in December 2006.

They’d been friends since childhood when Moren, then 12, would baby-sit Chris, then 8.

That day in 2006, Moren took his hand to say a prayer, not realizing who he was.

“This electric shock went up my arm and I said, ‘oh no!’” Moren said.

They stayed together from that day on in a relationship that lasted just a year.

“He was my soulmate,” Moren said. “He told me every day how much he loved me, how much he appreciated me and if he was to die then, he would die a happy man.”

Her son James said that generally he didn’t want anything to do with his mother’s boyfriends, but Chris stuck it out.

“He got through it. And if he could do that I knew he was the right guy.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.