Slain child's family seeks to reveal juvenile sex offenders.

October 14, 2000

OILTON, Okla. -- Kristi Blevins' impish smile greets every customer at the grocery store across the street from the abandoned home where she died.

The 7-year-old beams from a wallet-sized photograph taped to petitions at two registers. She smiles, too, at people getting fill-ups at gas stations down the road. Even in a grocery store in the next county, Kristi's wide-eyed grin stops customers who ad d their names to a growing list of signatures under her photo.

Since last week, Rhonda Blevins has counted more than 2,000 signatures on petitions backing a law she thinks could have saved her youngest child.

Blevins wants juvenile sex offenders included in an Oklahoma law that alerts the public to adult sex offenders in their midst. On a rented computer and the $50 printer she bought last week, she has cranked out more than 1,000 petitions and taped a photo of Kristi to each one.

"The kids come home, mom's sitting there working petitions. They go to bed, I'm working on petitions. If I didn't,'' says the 34-year-old mother of three other children, ''I would probably be crying all the time."

On Aug. 19, she and her husband discovered that Kristi and a 12-year-old friend, who had been playing outside, were missing from their Oilton home.

Searchers found the two in an abandoned home. The 12-year-old had been raped. Kristi had been strangled. With them, police found Robert Rotramel, a 19-year-old with a juvenile record of detention for forcible sodomy.


Copyright © 2000 The Dominion Post.