Mykarsha Rogers agreed to let her 15-year-old special-needs brother stay with extended family in New York City for the summer so she could have a break, with no inkling of the horror that would unfold.
“I wish I never did,” a devastated Rogers, 38, said this month in an exclusive interview with the Daily News. “It hurts. It definitely hurts.”
Jallen McConnie was killed in an apartment in NYCHA’s Wise Towers on the Upper West Side on June 28, 2021, after being tortured by three of his adult cousins, two of them brother and sister, prosecutors say.
“He was very, very smart, well spoken,” Rogers said of her slain brother. “He liked to draw. He liked to read.”
One cousin, Johnette Booker, 43, was found guilty of all counts, including manslaughter, by a Manhattan Supreme Court jury on Feb. 5. Booker’s brother is awaiting trial on manslaughter charges and her cousin, who faced lesser charges, is serving a three-and-a-half year prison term after pleading guilty to assault.
According to prosecutors, Booker hit Jallen with a belt for more than an hour in her living room the day he died. Her brother and cousin also hit him with belts and punched him that day, prosecutors say.
Booker and her brother Mitchaux Booker, 36, brought the teen to the bathroom and Johnette helped as one of her relatives ordered him to open his mouth and forced water down his throat until he collapsed in the bathtub, according to prosecutors. The teen’s cause of death was determined to be homicidal asphyxia, or suffocation.
From left, Joevon McConnie, Mitchaux Booker and Johnette Booker.
Jallen, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, oppositional defiance disorder and was believed to be autistic, spent the previous 32 days being hit repeatedly with belts as part of what Johnette Booker called “cousin boot camp”.
Johnette Booker made the boy sleep on the floor and denied him his medications. She forced him to sit facing the wall with his legs crossed for most of the day and made him do exhausting exercises, hold heavy books over his head, stand in the corner touching his toes and scrub her floors, prosecutors say.
It was a harrowing end for a child who had already endured so much, said Rogers. She adopted Jallen after their mother died in 2019 from leukemia and brought him from North Carolina to live in Athens, Ga.
Despite his troubles, Jallen was progressing and about to enter 10th grade when he was killed.
The teen who loved Takis, playing basketball and sketching characters from Dragon Ball Z could sometimes be a challenge. And when her cousins offered help, Rogers accepted.
“Me and Jallen were going through a lot of things together,” Rogers explained. “Johnette said, ‘I’ll take him off your hands for the summer. I’ll take care of him.’”
Jallen McConnie with sister Mykarsha Rogers. (Courtesy Mykarsha Rogers)
While Jallen stayed in the apartment on W. 94th St. near Columbus Ave., Rogers was preparing for his return to Georgia in a couple of months. She was looking for a new doctor for him and speaking with a co-worker who was a coach on a local football team after the teen expressed interest in the sport.
In video calls with her brother during the time he was in New York, Rogers saw no cause for alarm, but looking back remembers that Johnette Booker was always present during the conversations.
“[Johnette Booker] would hold the camera so it would show him,” said Rogers. “I would ask, ‘Are you are OK?’ and he would say ‘I’m fine.’”
Then, late on June 28, Rogers got a different kind of call from another cousin, Joevon McConnie.
“Joevon called my phone that night and said [Jallen] was on the way to the hospital. “He said [Jallen] was sick and he told him to take a shower.”
The details were scarce. Rogers paced back and forth unsure of what to do next.
A hospital worker called her and notified her of Jallen’s death, and then the calls from hospital staff kept coming, revealing some of the horrors the teen had been subjected to.
“I got phone calls from people at the hospital asking about his medicine,” recalled Rogers. “He was wearing a diaper. About bruises — ‘Does he bruise easily?’”
The full scope of Jallen’s painful last weeks and the betrayal by Rogers’ family soon began to come into focus.
The day after the teen’s death, Mitchaux Booker told investigators he had beaten Jallen at least 50 times with a belt in the face and body and then, after watching Jallen “‘buckle’ and slump down into the tub with the water running” left him lying there for about two hours, according to a criminal complaint. He was arrested the following day.
The News reported in October 2021 that Mitchaux Booker admitted to assaulting Jallen on the day he died because the teen had interrupted him while he was watching Netflix.
Johnette Booker and Joevon McConnie were not arrested until May 2022, 11 months after the boy’s death.
Jallen McConnie (Courtesy of Mykarsha Rogers)
When The News asked Johnette Booker’s husband Shawn Davis earlier this month about her conviction, he maintained his wife’s innocence, though he did say the teen had been hit by his wife earlier that summer and by several other family members on the day of his death.
“I know what it’s like to be severely beaten, but I will say this, I ain’t seen anybody hit with a belt die. Ever,” said Davis, standing in the doorway of the dimly lit apartment where the teen was killed.
“I’m still here. [My wife] was abused by her mother and father. She’s still here. You understand what I’m saying? When has a belt killed any child? When has a belt killed anyone?”
Prosecutors say Johnette gave shifting explanations to authorities of what happened to the boy, lying to medics, cops, ACS workers, hospital staff and relatives. She first claimed she wasn’t home when he was killed, then claimed the teen was jumped by a group of boys in a park near her home. She went on to claim he committed suicide and filed a letter to the court falsely claiming she was in her bedroom and couldn’t hear what was happening when Jallen was killed, according to the Manhattan DA.
Johnette’s cousin Joevon McConnie, 42, was sentenced to 3.5 years in state prison in June 2024 after pleading guilty to assault.
McConnie’s lawyer Terrence Grifferty said Jallen’s death was “a terrible tragic story.”
“It was a misguided attempt to straighten the kid out, and they were not qualified to do it,” Grifferty said last week.
“[Joevon] did strike the kid as far as discipline, but he hit him the least amount of times, according to a witness,” the lawyer added. “One thing they didn’t know — and I didn’t know — that striking someone with a belt can cause real internal injuries.”
Mitchaux Booker’s case is still open, and he is next due in court March 12. Lawyers for Johnette and Mitchaux Booker declined to comment to The News.
“She physically and emotionally tortured her cousin with special needs,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said after Johnette Booker’s conviction. “Instead of providing him with love and care when she assumed the role of caregiver by taking him into her home for the summer, she preyed on him, and her actions and omissions caused his tragic death.”
Johnette Booker is set to be sentenced on March 7.
More than three years after Jallen’s death, his sister feels some relief after the two convictions and is looking forward to marking Johnette’s sentencing with a celebration of Jallen at his grave, in the same cemetery where their mother is buried in North Carolina. She recently launched a GoFundMe to provide a headstone for the boy’s grave.
“I’m glad justice is being served,” said Rogers. “It’s a long time coming.”
But the celebration will be a brief flash of light in her everyday reality, which is much darker.
“There are some days I sit at home and just think, what are things I could have done to be a better sister?” she said. “I felt a lot of guilt behind this. I think about it every day.”
“That was our safe place, the beach — we would go there and just act like kids,” she added. “I don’t like going to the beach no more, because he’s not with me. I take the day off on his birthday. I hate when schooltime comes around for the kids, because we would go out shopping. It hurts even more, me coming home these days, because I don’t see a letter from him saying I have the best sister in the world … I’m just numb.”
With Julian Roberts-Grmela