Semmie Williams Jr. gets 35 years for random killing of Ryan Rogers

Thirty-five years was the number Palm Beach County settled on, but it was still a long way from the life sentence prosecutors pushed for in the random killing of 14-year-old Ryan Rogers. The punishment gave the Rogers family accountability in court, yet it also left Williams facing decades behind bars for a child’s death that still shocks Palm Beach Gardens.

A Palm Beach County jury had already found Semmie Williams Jr. guilty on January 23 of second-degree murder with a weapon for the November 15, 2021, attack. Prosecutors said Williams stabbed Ryan repeatedly while the boy was riding his bike, less than two miles from his Palm Beach Gardens home, near the I-95 overpass. The state attorney’s office said Williams had no connection to the community and had come from another county before the killing.

At sentencing on April 22, the hearing turned emotional and tense. Williams interrupted the proceedings and kept insisting he had been set up, adding to the strain inside the courtroom. The defense asked for a little more than 21 years, arguing that Williams’ mental illness and intellectual disability should sharply reduce the punishment. A judge had already ruled out the death penalty on those grounds, so the sentencing fight was about how much prison time Williams should actually serve.

Prosecutors used the hearing to argue that Williams remained a danger to the public. They also introduced Dennis Joseph Brinks, a 77-year-old Georgia man, who testified that Williams attacked him in a 2013 Atlanta incident and warned him, “I’m going to finish you.” Prosecutors said that earlier violence fit the pattern they saw in the Rogers case.

The family and friends in the room made the loss impossible to ignore. Assistant State Attorney Jo Wilensky wrote that Ryan was not even halfway through his freshman year of high school and would never graduate, go to college, or get married. State Attorney Alexcia Cox said no prison term can restore what was taken from Ryan’s family and the community. Ryan’s friend Sienna Wise told the court she lost one of her closest friends and would always remember Ryan for his parents and brother.

After sentencing, Williams yelled to be moved to general population as soon as possible, and Ryan’s father, Brian Rogers, shouted back, “You’ll be dead within a year.” The sentence carries credit for time served, so Williams will remain in prison for years to come, with only the usual appellate and postconviction fights left as any real legal path forward. The Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office thanked the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s detectives for the investigation that brought the case to this point.