JENNINGS — She had his gun and she was leaving.
He followed in his car, half-dressed, as she stormed away from his house. Get in the car and come home, he pleaded. You can turn this around.
His focus shifted to her daughters, trailing behind. Please come back.
But LaRhonda N. Mason had already decided that her family would not see the new year.
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Her daughters, Teleanna, 11, and Jazelyn, 3, followed her down a Jennings sidewalk on a freezing New Year's Eve, leaving behind the friend who, for more than two weeks, had given them shelter, food and let them do their homework on his coffee table and watch his cable TV.
"But all of that wasn't hers," the friend said, interviewed last week at his home, a meticulously kept one-story house off of West Florissant Avenue.
"I guess she felt maybe someday I would say, 'You all got to go.' And she'd be right back to where she started."
Mason considered herself a failure, said the friend. She was jobless, homeless. She had no money and bad credit. She was facing a court date for traffic charges.
She told him that her Ford Escort had been towed in St. Louis for unpaid parking tickets around Christmas. Because the car was unregistered, the claim could not immediately be confirmed by city records.
Losing her car sent her deep into depression, the friend said. No car equals no job equals no money equals no home equals no life.
She felt her family could not survive, and that she could not achieve legitimacy. Even something basic, like a properly registered and insured car, eluded her.
"This big ol' system is pimping all of us," he said.
Mason almost certainly had ways to improve her life and sustain her family — welfare, shelters, counseling, job training. The friend says she could have stayed put. He has two steady jobs as a cook and is always working.
Instead, the option she chose was his loaded gun.
The friend blames himself for keeping it in the house. He said he had bought it to fire into the sky at midnight on New Year's Eve (as part of the widespread urban tradition discouraged by authorities as a threat to safety and property) but never considered it would be used to end three lives.
He said he fears others would blame him for the deaths and try to get revenge. He spoke with the newspaper on the condition that his name not be used.
"It's a crazy world out there," he said.
He said he and Mason, each 29, had lost touch after working fast food jobs together 13 years ago.
In the intervening years, he had two sons who are now 9 and 7. They live with their mother in St. Charles County. Mason's only son died as an infant in 1998. But she had her two daughters.
In October, the friend was at Spruill's, a boisterous St. Louis club, when he saw Mason. He said she was a waitress.
They were no longer kids slinging burgers but adults struggling to get by. He got her number.
He called a month later and reached her at a coin laundry near his house. He went to see her. Mason said she and her two girls were renting a room off North Kingshighway for $110 per month. Most of her belongings were in storage.
"I said, 'You don't have to pay for storage, I've got all this room right here.'"
Weeks later, he invited her to move in. Nothing romantic, he said.
Though she had family just blocks away, in the Walnut Park neighborhood, he said, she spoke little about them. She told him that she had spent some of her childhood in group homes, a claim backed up by a relative.
"The girl just felt alone," he said.
Mason's mother and sister declined to speak with the Post-Dispatch. Jennings police refused to make their investigative report and the suicide note available to a reporter, and said her survivors told them they did not want to be interviewed.
The friend said he told her not to quit after the car was towed. He has a second car in his garage. She could have it. It wasn't registered, he said, but she could put in a battery, slap on some phony plates and worry about getting legit when she was on her feet.
As for her court date coming up, he said he urged her to tell the judge that she was homeless and working hard to get her life back on track.
Instead, she penned a note thanking those who had tried to help her. Two nights later, with her friend begging her to come home, she tossed it into his car.
He turned the corner and pulled over to get out. And she pulled out his gun and shot each of her daughters in the head, then herself.
Police arrived to find three dead females, a man oddly dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and slippers, and a witness who saw him following them.
The friend was the logical suspect. Officers impounded his car, put him in cuffs and brought him to the station.
Mason's note helped clear him. When police tested his hands for gunpowder, and found none, they released him and recognized him as someone who had tried to help.
But that "big ol' system" snagged him, too.
He said he couldn't get his car out of the impound lot until two days later and had to pay $280 to get it back.
And somewhere in the transfer between police and the tow yard, his keys were lost.
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