BY WESLEY YOUNG
SALISBURY POST

The man who killed Anthony West in New York faces a lifetime behind bars without possibility of parole, prosecutors say.

Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson said 23-year-old Romere Anderson was found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the Rowan County man, and will be sentenced April 15 in New York.

The murder took place on Sept. 5, 1996, in the Bronxdale housing project, where Anthony West, 20, had gone to visit his aunt at her apartment.

‘‘My son will never come back to me,’’ said his mother, Margaret West of Faith. ‘‘They convicted the other boy, but he is somebody’s child too. Some people might say, ‘Yeah, that is great.’ But he was somebody’s child too. I am not one of those people to say I was happy.’’

Prosecutors say West and his brother, Clarence William West, both visiting from North Carolina, had been seen in the neighborhood spending large amounts of money and riding around in a stretch limousine.

On the day of the murder, Johnson said, Anderson and a 23-year-old man named Akil Bryant put on ski masks and gloves and staked out the apartment from a stairwell armed with handguns.

When Anthony West approached the apartment – his brother was already inside, asleep – the two armed men accosted him from behind and forced him to knock on the door.

Despite having a gun held to his head, Johnson said, West rushed into the apartment when a woman inside opened the door and he screamed for her to run. Meanwhile, Anthony West struggled with one gunman. Bryant was shot with his own gun during the struggle. Anderson then shot and killed West.

Bryant and Anderson fled from the apartment, but Bryant collapsed outside the building and died, Johnson said. Anderson fled to Ohio, and was captured a year later.

‘‘We had witnesses that came forward,’’ said Detective Ellen Kelly, who worked the case in New York. Anderson was put on trial in the middle of February, and the trial ended in mid-March. The conviction was the first under a new law that went into effect Sept. 1, 1998, in which the death penalty is possible for those who murder during the commission of a felony – in this case, robbery. However, the Bronx district attorney did not seek the death penalty.

Anthony West and his older brother Clarence West were both facing charges of conspiracy to distribute nearly $1 million of crack cocaine at the time of the killing. Clarence West was later convicted of a drug charge and is in prison in New Jersey. Anderson and the suspect who died did not know the West brothers, authorities said, saying the shooting was a robbery and unconnected with illegal drug dealing.

Margaret West, the mother of the two men, said the conviction of Anderson brought her no joy. She believes Anthony was innocent of the charge against him, and that he had ‘‘made up his mind to do everything straight and right.’’

Margaret West said Anthony had gone to New York to visit his aunt and show her his new 3-month-old baby girl. He also wanted to check on his brother, who had gone to New York earlier.

‘‘He wanted to show the baby off,’’ she said. ‘‘He was worried about his brother William. He said he was going to see about William.

‘‘All he wanted to do was raise his baby and live like everyone else.’’

And he wanted to come home and clear his name, she said.

‘‘They ... said he was along with the other boys and the other son dealing the drugs,’’ Margaret West said. ‘‘It wasn’t him. He wasn’t involved. He never had a chance to clear his name.’’

The night he was shot was the very night Anthony West was planning to come home, his mother said.

A couple nights later, the phone at Margaret West’s house rang, and it was one of her daughters ‘‘screaming to the top of her lungs’’ that Anthony was dead.

‘‘Anthony was a beautiful person,’’ she said. ‘‘He was my baby. He was the kind that was always the peacemaker in the family. If there was a fight, he would tell them they weren’t raised to fight each other.’’

Her youngest son sprouted up to become a huge young man, standing 6 feet, 4 inches tall and scaring passersby with his sheer size.

‘‘One night he came in and said, ‘Pray for my feet ... my feet are growing too fast,’’’ his mother said. ‘‘That bothered him, that he was so huge.’’

Anthony told his mother that people would cross the street to avoid him when they saw him walking toward them, and that bothered him. He wasn’t violent, she said, and he worried that people thought he might hurt them. She said she told him to smile when he encountered someone, so that the other person wouldn’t get frightened.

‘‘He came back later and said, ‘You’re right,’’’ she said. Smiling worked.

Anthony’s great-aunt, Kathleen Propst, told the Post on Saturday that her reaction to the verdict was that ‘‘justice needs to be done.’’

She said she loved Anthony ‘‘because he was a child in my family and I was like a grandmother to him.’’

Anthony seemed to have a premonition of his death, his mother said. Margaret West recalls how he made a point of asking her and his father, Otis West, to raise his baby if anything happened to him.

Before he went to New York, she said, Anthony told family members ‘‘to stick together as a family and try to help each other.’’ It made everyone wonder what he was talking about, but he just replied that he wanted to express his love.

Margaret West says that she had been telling her son it was time to get a regular job, since he was a new father. She wanted him to ‘‘finish school ... get back on track and go to church.’’

Saturday, talking about Anthony brought back memories. How as a little boy he was always waiting for a fruit treat his mother would leave him in a bag. It’s hard to know you’ll outlive your own child, she said.

‘‘Sometimes I can be washing dishes and think about how he used to run across the back yard playing ball,’’ she said.

She remembers an essay Anthony wrote in elementary school. He had written that he wanted to ‘‘work hard, go to college, have a nice job, a nice home, and a nice wife and children.’’

‘‘It was a typical dream, that’s what it was,’’ she said.

She doesn’t think it’s right that people who have read the paper see a drug dealer who got shot in New York.

‘‘Maybe I’m mama and I can’t see like other people, but I don’t think so,’’ she said.