by Jeff Hobbs
Rob was a quiet boy who, with his broad chest and wide shoulders and constant glower, strutted around the school as if someone had just stolen something that he wanted back. With only eighteen students per grade, he stood out. He wore boots with untied laces, and the belt of his pants hung halfway down his backside (he still took care to make sure his shirt was tucked in, in accordance with the dress code). He received A’s in every subject.
The heavy burden Rob carried was clear to all around him. But whatever plagued him specifically, he didn’t speak of it, and his self-contained bearing inhibited his classmates from asking (they were, after all, ten years old, though many were growing up much faster than they deserved). And as Rob gradually made friends and ingratiated himself with his teachers—through work ethic and graciousness, if not his demeanor and appearance—he never mentioned the trial unfolding downtown throughout the fall of 1990. Rob’s first months of private school were his father’s last months of being presumed innocent.
AFTER MORE THAN three years of waiting, the weeks-long jury selection began. Though the jury ended up being composed of eight blacks and four whites, the defense attorneys still complained of racial bias since the composition did not adequately represent the area in which the crime had occurred. In turn, the prosecution chose its jurors based on the strength of their belief in the death penalty.
The actual trial spanned a single week in November 1990. Mr. Lechliter’s opening statement painted an intimate, detailed rendering of the morning of August 8, 1987, with multiple references to the infant in the apartment. Then he called a parade of policemen who’d been at the scene of the crime. One after another, these officers described the arrangement of the bodies of the two women, the disarray of Skeet’s apartment and the drug paraphernalia found there, the photo corroborated by the single witness, and the moment when Skeet had been apprehended, armed with the loaded murder weapon, sitting among children. Lechliter’s strategy seemed to be to imprint his narrative on the jury through force of repetition, as nine different policemen answered more or less the same two dozen questions over the course of three afternoons. During cross-examination of the State’s witnesses, Skeet’s public defenders focused almost exclusively on details of positioning, needling each officer to recount, practically down to the square inch, where he had stood during every moment of the crime scene investigation. Even the judge seemed to grow prickly during these lengthy, sometimes redundant exchanges during which few conclusions or refutations were made. Aside from a few roundabout assertions that a certain officer couldn’t have seen a certain piece of evidence at a certain time because of a door or obstruction of some kind, the lawyer’s strategy was unclear and ineffective.
A ballistics expert for the prosecution then explained why the spent rounds found at the crime scene could have been fired only by the gun found on Skeet at the time of arrest.
And then Georgianna Broadway, who had recovered from her wounds, took the witness stand. Though her foggy memory and misunderstanding of hearsay laws muddled what the prosecution intended to be a highly dramatic moment, her testimony still concluded with her pointing to Skeet Douglas and identifying him as the murderer. “Him right there. He killed Stella and Charlene.”
After six days, Mr. Lechliter rested his case. He had not pressed any of his witnesses to present a motive to the crime (nor had the defense pointed out the lack of one). He had based his case on the same set of facts he’d learned of in the days following Skeet’s arrest: a witness placing the defendant at the crime scene, a less reliable witness pointing to him as the shooter, and a murder weapon owned by and found on him.
The witnesses for the defense numbered three: an old friend of Skeet’s from junior high basketball, the mother of another childhood friend, and a neighbor from Pierson Street. All served strictly as character witnesses, asserting Skeet’s basic kindness and aversion to trouble. After each witness spoke, Mr. Lechliter approached for the prosecution’s cross-examination and asked a single question: “Were you in Apartment 2D of 7 Chestnut Street on the morning of August 8th, 1987?” to which each witness replied no. The defense’s case lasted less than an hour.
And yet the jury reported they couldn’t reach a consensus despite deliberating for a longer time than the trial proper had actually taken. Maybe Georgianna’s choppy testimony had interrupted the prosecution’s story (the jury had requested a reading of Georgianna’s transcript multiple times during deliberation). Maybe the stark visual contrast between nine white policemen testifying against one black man proved hard to overlook. Maybe one of them believed the defense attorney when, in his closing statement, he asked the jury to consider the possibility that, in an area long known for police corruption, one or all of the arresting officers might have conspired to plant the weapon in Skeet’s belt.
The judge directed them to deliberate for at least another day, noting that one of the jurors had reported sick during one day of deliberation. He sternly insisted that a verdict should be reached.
When the twelve citizens finally emerged, they did so with a verdict: guilty on each of two counts of first-degree murder, as well as one count of aggravated assault on Georgianna Broadway and possession of an unregistered handgun.
On December 13, 1990, after more than four dozen appearances at the courthouse over the previous three years, Skeet came back for the sentencing. The state sought the death penalty, but Skeet received a life sentence in Trenton State Prison. He would not be eligible for parole until 2020, thirty years hence. Near the end of the hearing, Skeet was given a chance to make a statement. He stood up before the court and cleared his throat.
I respect my lawyers and I have a lot of respect for them and I think they’re fine gentlemen, but as far as in a professional capacity sometimes, well, from my understanding a crime is committed, the police reports are taken and all investigations go at that point and from that point and if those police reports are erroneous then people are going to have erroneous investigations and they’re going to try to defend based on that. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Lechliter, I know he’s just doing his job, but he wasn’t there and if they say this is the designated defendant then it’s his job to win the case, you know, but the truth never came out. It’s win or lose and unfortunately my lawyers lost, but justice wasn’t done and the truth never came out during that trial and I think a better effort could have been put forth . . . From the beginning, as I said, I did not commit this crime. I know the jury has determined that I’m guilty of the crime. I really don’t know anything about what happened in that room. I was not there. I did not commit the crime. I was arrested and unfortunately the only gentleman that could really tell the truth, since I did not take the stand, under the advice of my attorneys, was Mr. Irving Gaskins and he died. I did not have the weapon on me, that’s completely fabricated . . . [Gaskins is] the only one that could tell what happened at the time of my arrest, that I did not have a weapon on me . . . I don’t know why I’m accused of this and I never saw the photographs of the actual crime scene until court. I don’t understand how a person could come in a doorway and shoot someone whose right side is facing the doorway and she is shot on the opposite side and there was no testimony elicited from the medical examiner as far as the person that’s supposed to have fired the shots. Someone evidently fired the shots, but where they could have been standing for this lady to be shot from someone coming from one direction and the entrance wound, contact entrance wounds are coming from the opposite direction. I just don’t understand that and it was never brought out in the trial . . . I mean it seemed like Miss Broadway was laying on that side and that’s the side where the shots came from. I mean, something is not right here and I’ve been convicted of this—
At this point, the judge stopped him and said, “I know that you have sustained throughout the trial and today your innocence and as you can see I’m struggling. I really don’t know. I’m sitting here with the verdict and I don’t know . . .”
Skeet finished by saying:
I have a ten year old son. His mother has been very gracious. He’s been coming to the jail every week for three and a half years. This whole thing is unbelievable. I know I’ve been convicted. As I said from the beginning, as God is witness, I’m innocent of this crime. My heart goes out to the family of Charlene and Estella Moore . . . but I have a family and my son’s a beautiful child and when I was out there I spoiled him. I was with him everyday. I thank God that he’s a very brilliant child. He’s a straight-A student and he sings in the choir at church and . . .
Finally, Skeet trailed off, shook his head, and sat. Rob and Jackie were not in the audience, and hadn’t been at all throughout the trial. This, like the prison visits, had been Skeet’s decision. He hadn’t wanted either of them to see him in this most vulnerable position. After gearing his entire existence and child-rearing philosophy around friends, Skeet’s fate ultimately lay at the mercy and judgment of strangers.
JACKIE CONSIDERED THAT maybe it was a good thing Skeet would be gone for a while, considering that the Mt. Carmel uniform would have given him an aneurysm: pink shirt, brown slacks, with a purple-and-pink plaid tie.
Two evident types of children walked through the neighborhood each afternoon. The kids who went to school walked in cheery clusters, many wearing simple bicolored uniforms and carrying backpacks. They walked slowly to and from the bus stop, savoring one another’s company, none eager to part ways and return home to whatever awaited them there.
The other kids walked in much smaller groups, usually two but never more than three. During the summer they wore wife-beater undershirts, and during the winter they wore baggy coats that they shouldn’t have been able to afford. Whether these children actually sold drugs or simply wanted to project an association with people who did, Jackie felt sorry for them—sorry for the fact that ten and twenty years down the road, assuming they were not incarcerated or dead, they would be doing exactly the same thing they were doing now. These kids, mostly boys, mostly fatherless she presumed, would pass by the schoolkids, leering. The schoolkids, whose safety came from numbers, would quiet for a moment and walk on. Jackie saw this dynamic almost every day on the corners on either end of Chapman Street, but only as she edged farther into her forties did she begin to see the power in it: half the generation already lost, the other half just trying to get home each day.
Just after Skeet’s conviction, Jackie splurged on a gift for her son: the A volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She bought it from a door-to-door salesman, with a spontaneity rare for her, and she began saving extra so that every few months she could furnish another volume.
Her faith in her son’s promise began with his intense interest in books, a passion that could not be taught, not where they lived and not with Jackie’s work schedule. These books were gateways, not just in abstractions of the mind but to real-world opportunity. They led him to as many school academic squads as he could fit into his schedule and subsequent competitions in the tristate region. Unlike Oakdale, the Mt. Carmel teams were actually capable of winning. Rob began bringing home ribbons, certificates, and small plastic trophies. He placed them all in a cardboard box beneath his bed. He joined a traveling church choir at St. Mary’s. Rob never said much about these extracurriculars, aside from asking for rides to and from places and small amounts of money for travel fees. “Industrious,” the nuns at Mt. Carmel called him. “Focused . . . advanced . . .”
Jackie, Frances, Horace—everyone who loved Rob—feared the effect that Skeet’s conviction would have on the boy’s energy, his intelligence, and above all his spirit. After news came of the sentencing, and after they made their final visit to Essex County Jail before the transfer to Trenton State, Rob turned inward and ceased to ask questions, perhaps because the first question he’d asked about his father back in August 1987—“When is he coming home?”—had finally, irrefutably been answered. His family could only hope that he was pushing at his own pace through this uniquely protracted process of losing a father. They believed he was strong enough to do this on his own, and they hoped he wouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture; they hoped he wouldn’t get mired in self-pity. Self-pity was hard to avoid in East Orange, and once it took hold of a person, it was harder to shed. Jackie knew that. Her rule for herself, in the event of loss or strain or bad luck, was to take a night to feel sorry for herself, typically with a strong drink next to her bed. The next morning, she flushed the sorrow out with her hangover.
In her son’s case, she was confident that the new friends who surrounded him at Mt. Carmel, many of whom had lost fathers themselves and possessed the sympathy needed to relate one situation to another earnestly, would be sufficient to move her son forward.
She didn’t know that Rob hadn’t told his friends anything about his father. As far as any of them knew, the man had simply never been around, a typical enough story that Rob could wholly elude their attention and whatever support they might have given.
A SIGNAL EVENT in Newark history had occurred four years earlier, in 1986, when Sharpe James had been elected mayor. A former alderman, he’d campaigned on a platform of jobs, improved low-income housing, and attracting development money back to downtown Newark. Over the next twenty years, Mayor James would govern a generation of Newarkers. He presented himself as a different sort of politician, who had lived his whole life among residents, who wore jogging suits in public, and who knew and cared about the people on the individual level. At the time of his election, Newark proper was 52 percent African American, and the African American community for the most part adored Sharpe James. Skeet Douglas, in the eight months between James’s inauguration and his own arrest, was one of those people, and the mayor had been a fixture in Skeet’s neighborhood conversational rounds.
At the time, more than one in three people in Newark lived below the poverty line. The violent crime rate was so consistently high that a 1996 Time magazine article dubbed Newark the most dangerous city in America. The public high school graduation rate was below 60 percent, and in some outlying areas, such as East Orange, less than 10 percent of residents held a college degree. The city had lost 130,000 residents since the 1967 riots. The Ironbound District, once a busy, ethnically diverse commercial center northeast of the train station, was now a seedy stretch of shuttered storefronts inhabited by squatters. Some of the oldest companies in the city’s downtown, such as Prudential Insurance, were trying to move; attracting workers had become too difficult. The city had gone so far as to construct enclosed “skyways” two stories above the ground, so that employees in the city center could walk from building to building without having to set foot on the street.
These larger socioeconomic problems persisted through Mayor James’s first term, while he sorted through the complicated, land mine–laden pathways toward revitalization. His primary goals were to raze the project towers built by Mayor Addonizio’s administration in the ’50s and replace them with small-scale public housing and middle-income units, and to bring a performing arts center and sports arena downtown. But as he worked toward these and other aims (while also committing the first of more than fifty fraudulent acts that would lead to his own indictment years later, in 2007), he offered many of his residents a symbol. Here was a dignified black man of resonant conviction, born and bred here, who’d gone to college and worked his whole life and now, in his early fifties, had entered public service to serve the public. In fact, an acquaintance of Jackie’s had asked Mayor James for a job during one of his rallies downtown, and a week later she was hired as a school crossing guard.
Rob heard this and other stories, and in his own ten-year-old way came to worship James, who in 1990—while Rob began private school and Skeet began his lifetime prison sentence—easily won a second term in office. His face brightened when he or Horace or one of the nuns at Mt. Carmel spoke of the mayor. The Oranges were their own townships with their own city halls and did not fall under
James’s jurisdiction. But Newark cast a long shadow. To a boy like Rob, growing up on Chapman Street and never attending a school beyond walking distance, that cluster of earth-toned towers a mile and a half to the east, surrounded by a network of tall steel cantilever bridges spanning the Passaic River, represented a beacon, a diverse population center where commerce, education, and potential converged. And Sharpe James was the standard-bearer.
Jackie was surprised when her son suddenly began watching the news, just to hear what the mayor said. In fifth grade, he composed a biography of him. He asked her to take him to speeches downtown, which were held whenever Mayor James cleared a lot for a new office building or appropriated money to hire more police officers.
She didn’t know what the term “surrogate father” meant exactly, but years later she would agree—“Mm-hmm, I suppose that’s right”—when asked if Sharpe James might have been Rob’s first.
WITH SCHOOL TUITION effectively canceling out the pay raise Jackie had obtained, and with Skeet no longer contributing to the day-to-day, Rob saw how she struggled. There were, as ever, the constant night shifts. There were the ramen noodles and cans of beans and bags of rice in the cupboard. There were the increasing arguments at home about who was responsible for what share of annual property taxes, roughly $3,500 per year. There was Jackie’s contracting social life and the beeline she made for her bedroom upon returning home from work, where she immediately fell asleep. There were the aunts and uncles and cousins he’d grown up with who, in steady succession, left New Jersey for better opportunities in Ohio, Florida, Atlanta, or elsewhere in northern New Jersey (of Frances and Horace’s nine children and five grandchildren, only Jackie and Rob remained on Chapman Street). There was the decade of age Jackie had on the mothers of almost all his friends, and in the latter half of that decade a doubling of the financial and emotional burden she carried. Though she hadn’t wanted to marry Skeet, and though he hadn’t left them intentionally, the aura of abandonment intractably clung to her.