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MILWAUKEE - It has been nearly five years since 17-year-old Alan Lowrie was killed in cold blood at the West Milwaukee Arby's where he worked.

The custard stand murder this week of Rob Wilde has rekindled the raw grief Carol Lowrie felt when she found out her cheerful son had been murdered along with co-worker Nicole Joslyn.
 
"Why did they have to shoot them?" she asked aloud on that grim night. She still doesn't have an answer to that question.
 
Carol watched as Wilde's anguished parents addressed the media this week. 
 
"Just seeing them on the news today just brought everything back," she said as her eyes moistened. "I just sat and I cried because I remember how I felt."
 
Carol's home is all but a shrine to her dead son. The impressionistic oil self-portrait he did shortly before his death hangs in the living room. There are snapshots of the smiling boy in nearly every room. A collage of photos takes up much of a wall in the upstairs family room.
 
Out beside the house visitors to the Lowrie home are treated to a chorus of barking Saint Bernards. The family adopted the two 170-plus pound dogs, Shawnee and Dakota, the day before Alan's murder.

Carol will long remember her son's joy as the family returned from Beaver Dam with their new charges. "And he pushed the dogs aside," Carol said as she demonstrated her son's reach. "He reached over the seat, went like this (indicating a big hug) to my husband and kissed him on the cheek."
 
"'Thanks Mom, thanks Dad. I love you,'" she recalled her son saying. "And then he hugged the puppies."
 
Though she can smile now while remembering such moments, they also serve as a reminder that Rob Wilde's family is in agony.
 
"They're going through pure Hell," she said as she sat on her front stoop. "Because you never expect your child to go before you do."