Remember when: WNC congressional candidate Rogers worked for Menendez brother

Hayden Rogers, the former chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, is running this year for Shuler’s seat in Western North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. (Shuler isn’t seeking re-election.) Rogers has come a long way since his days at Princeton University, where he was buddies with Lyle Menendez. As you’ll recall, Lyle and Erik Menendez shotgun-blasted their parents to death while they were eating ice cream one day back in 1990.

Roll Call recalls Rogers’ connection to the Menendez case:

Remember the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers who murdered their parents with shotguns in cold blood? Congressional candidate Hayden Rogers (D) does.

Rogers, retiring Rep. Heath Shuler’s former chief of staff who is running to succeed his ex-boss in the Tar Heel State, lived in the same suite as Lyle Menendez for a time at Princeton University. Rogers worked for Menendez at a restaurant he bought after receiving money from his parents’ life insurance policy. And Rogers was in the car with Menendez the day Menendez was arrested in 1990.

Rogers was never implicated, implicitly or explicitly, in any wrongdoing. He served as chief operating officer of Mr. Buffalo’s, the New Jersey establishment Menendez bought after killing his mother and father, but before he was arrested for the infamous crime.

“He called me up and — I was working in construction — and he called me up and asked me if I would be interested in managing a restaurant he was looking at buying,” Rogers explained to Roll Call earlier this week. “I went up, talked about it, decided it was a good opportunity, so I went to work for him.”

Here’s the story the Princetonian printed at the time about Rogers and the Menendez connection.