by Jeff Hobbs
From SUMMITNJ1: This deceased drug-dealing character Robert Peace would have instantaneously shot anyone here who would have threatened his illegal (yet lucrative) source of dirty income. He was a thug through and through.
From njresident80: Who the heck is from Summit NJ?
Charles Cawley was staying at his Maine estate when he learned of Rob’s death via an email from Friar Leahy. He took his coffee outside into the gray, temperate northeastern spring. He sat on his patio and gazed down the lawn, which sloped steeply toward the rocky shore of Lincolnville Beach. He had a dock and assorted boats moored there. Tavarus had once gone fishing in the harbor during his St. Benedict’s retreat. Later this summer, twelve boys from the current St. Benedict’s student body would arrive to do the same. Mr. Cawley remained sitting there for a time, long after he’d finished his coffee, surprised by how unsurprised he was by the news of Rob’s passing. He was saddened, regretful, angry—but not surprised. Soon his wife joined him and patted his hand. He thought back to Friar Leahy’s introduction of Rob during the senior banquet in 1998. He thought of what he’d given the boy, not in terms of money but rather in choices, and he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn’t necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they’d begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.
The police, with so little information to go on, had rooted around the neighborhood but found little. They had no suspects, no prints, no evidence. The forty-eight-hour window in which the vast majority of violent crimes are solved had long since passed. Most likely, the murderers had fled town for a while, and the investigators’ ongoing hope was that one of them would be picked up on a moving violation or drug charge in Philadelphia or Baltimore or some other troubled urban clime. When Charlene and Estella Moore had been killed in 1987, the police had found a gun, an address, and a suspect armed with the murder weapon within twenty-eight hours. When Rob Peace had been killed in 2011, the police had found nothing.
Raquel was using Facebook in order to solicit donations from as many friends of Rob’s as she could in order to help pay Jackie’s funeral costs. She ultimately raised $5,000 but was disappointed by the fact that so many former classmates, many of them wealthy and many of whom had bought weed from Rob regularly in college, either failed to respond or outright refused due to the circumstances of his death. At the same time, Curtis was using the same platform in a brief and unsuccessful effort to hire his own private mercenaries to track down the killers and repay them in kind. The vendetta obsessed him as his own legal snarls carried on with hearings linking him with the commerce in his basement. Tavarus, who himself was incapacitated to the point of closing down his restaurant and getting a job as a telemarketer, convinced him to stop. Violence wasn’t going to solve violence. Rob was dead. That was the end of the story, punctuated by the tattoo Flowy had inked on his arm: “Real Peace Never Die BB4Life.” More important was trying to mend the break that had occurred between them and Jackie, at least to the point where she would talk to them again. They each tried calling, only to be rebuffed by the aunts and uncles who were still answering Jackie’s phone. That they would ever again know the woman they’d all called “Ma” began to feel hard to imagine, more so by far than the murderers being brought to justice. As of the publication of this book, neither has come to pass.
Jackie never took a day off work, and when she wasn’t at the nursing home, she was on Chapman Street taking care of Frances, who soon entered hospice care for kidney failure. Frances was in and out of her senses and often asked when Rob would be coming around to eat and watch TV. Jackie would tell her that Rob was on one of his trips, and she didn’t know when exactly he was coming back. His cousin had made a large poster for the funeral, with pictures of Rob as a kid holding a football on the sidewalk, after a water polo game with a towel slung over his neck, in Brazil, smiling in all of them. The pictures orbited a gold star, like an enlarged version of those handed out to elementary school students for work well done, in which was written his name and the years of his birth and death. Unframed, the arrangement stood propped on the back of the sofa in the parlor, facing the front window, that boyhood waiting place. In the evenings between cigarettes on the front porch, Jackie would sit in the dusky light and stare at the pictures. Thirty years of her son’s life had been reduced to those pictures, which had not been printed on glossy paper and so would fade and yellow with time. Whenever anyone visited, which was often in the months following her son’s death, she would nod her head and offer soft-sounding “yeah”s and “uh-huh”s as they conversed, conspicuously not about Rob most of the time. When he did come up and someone inferred directly or indirectly what a good boy he had been, what a tender and compassionate and intelligent soul he’d possessed, she would think of all his accomplishments as well as all he failed to accomplish, and she would say, “Yeah, I think he influenced a lot of people; I really do believe that . . .”
ASIDE FROM THE private grief coursing through many of its inhabitants, the neighborhood didn’t change in the wake of Rob’s death. Cory Booker continued to give eloquent speeches about how he was accomplishing something that no one before him had thought possible: he was revitalizing Newark (until two years later, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate). Crime statistics continued to be a centerpiece of these proclamations. Gangs continued to form and expand. Drugs continued to be sold on the corners and in the homes and in Orange Park, where Sundays were still reserved for children. People, many of whom were involved with gangs or drugs or both, continued to be killed. Babies were born to young mothers who formed sisterhoods together and could be found on temperate afternoons perched on stoops nursing their infants. Young men, many of them fathers, went to jail—including Curtis Gamble, one year and two months after Rob’s death. Children walked home from elementary schools in their various uniforms, laughing and swapping candy and listening to rap music. Seasons changed. Cars swooshed east and west on the I-280 beneath Mt. Carmel. Boys herded in the St. Benedict’s entrance each morning for convocation at eight o’clock. A percentage of these boys that far exceeded that of the surrounding populace went off to college in the fall. Planes flew in and out of Newark International. People got through their lives, navigating the socioeconomic boundaries that made interesting geometrical shapes across Newark and the Oranges. Those living in the impoverished districts spent their days tending to the immediate obligations of family and money and their nights dreaming of not living there anymore someday, most knowing these were only dreams: incorporeal constructs formed by imaginative and hopeful minds. Jackie made the seven-minute drive to the nursing home each morning and came back each night, careful to keep her car doors locked and her windows raised once she crossed from South Orange into East Orange. She did this until she retired at the end of December 2012, thinking that she would use her nephew Nathan’s Continental buddy pass to visit Brazil. The grass that surrounded the small earthen depression around plot 54, row 7, of Rosedale Cemetery grew thick in the summer and yellowed in the fall and was covered by snow in the winter. Sometimes a bunch of flowers could be found tucked within it, or a mix CD, or a short note. Most of the time the receptacle remained empty, hidden, there only to people who knew where to look, no different in appearance or texture from all the grass around it.
On what would have been Rob’s thirty-first birthday in June, just over a month after his murder, Raquel and Rene arrived at 181 Chapman Street in the early evening. Neither had ever been to his home before, and Rene had never met his mother. She was surprised by the life, the spark, contained in the bereaved woman’s eyes, which reminded her of Rob even though all she’d ever heard from him was how much he looked like his father. Raquel was remembering her crazy thirtieth birthday party in SoHo last fall, where at one point Rob had called out, “My birthday’s on June twenty-fifth!” as if
to say that he wouldn’t object if she were to throw him a party akin to the one she’d thrown herself. Instead, in the parlor, she gave Jackie an envelope packed with checks that had come from all over the world to help allay the monetary cost of his death. She’d worked almost full-time for a month accumulating them. Some were for $10 or $20. Others were for $100, $200, $250. All in all, they added up to about $5,000. To the same degree that she was grateful to those who had contributed, Raquel remained angry with those who had refused.
“Thank you,” Jackie said softly.
As they embraced, Raquel replied, “It’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.”
Later that night, his friends and family gathered at Passion. Though not a strip club, the bar had once been something like one, back when Jackie had met Skeet for the first time there. Poles and platforms stood behind the bar. Jackie brought three of her girlfriends and was determined to smile through it all. Victor and Lisa Wingo and Sherman Feerick and Dexter Lopina and Coach Ridley and Carl and Shannon Heggins and Nathan were there. Tamba DJ’d. Guests drank blue Long Island iced teas and little beers in Rob’s honor and the music grew louder and a pleasant drunkenness settled on the crowd. Before long people were dancing on the platforms, twisting themselves around the poles, all of this behavior silly and raucous—a night Rob would have enjoyed observing from off to the side, commenting on the gleeful idiocy on display. Jackie found herself able to channel her son and laugh authentically until the cake was brought out. That moment was the only one in which Jackie had cried since the early morning after Rob’s death when, while waiting for the call that would confirm what a night of driving around the police stations and hospitals of East Orange had already told her was her new reality, she had permitted herself a few moments of outward, solitary grief.
At the same time, in the backyard of 34 Smith Street, the Burger Boyz had congregated once again with a few packages of floating lanterns, lightweight paper balloons with a small combustible carbon cube suspended beneath the open bottom. These contraptions were hard to unfold and harder to light. The first few ripped, and the next few caught fire and had to be stomped out, and they joked about how frustrated Rob would have been watching their mechanical ineptitude. Ultimately they engineered a two-man system in which one held the balloon open and aloft while the other lit the charcoal, and one by one the lanterns began to rise slowly, gracefully above the yard, their gathering place for almost two decades as they’d grown from boys to young men to something more than young men but not quite old men, that gray in-between area during which most of their mistakes had been made. The lanterns accelerated and began to drift with the breeze, above the salutes sent from below, the toasting plastic cups of liquor and raised marijuana joints and the “East Side” hand gestures and cries of “Happy born day” and avowals of “You gonna live forever, Shawn Peace.” Soon they were just glimmering specks a few hundred feet above drifting east toward downtown, over the darkened side streets of East Orange where they had all inhabited various residences over the years, over the streaming headlights along the I-280 and the Garden State Parkway and Central Avenue and South Orange Avenue and the other thoroughfares that radiated like spokes from downtown Newark to the nether regions, over Bloomfield and Vailsburg and Irvington, over St. Benedict’s Preparatory Academy for Boys and the Passaic River and the rusty yet mighty bridges spanning it, a vantage point Rob had seen leaving for and returning from all his trips, from which the city looked so serene and sometimes, at the right angle and at the right time of night, even beckoning. At a certain point, the lights disappeared from view beyond the trees and eaves of the neighboring homes, leaving the Burger Boyz to sit down once again in the plastic fold-out chairs and wonder how long it would be before the flames flickered out and the lanterns began their descent. And once that happened, they wondered where each would fall.
Curtis Gamble’s house at 34 Smith Street. The black door at the base of the stairs leads directly down to the basement, where Rob Peace was shot twice and killed on the night of May 18, 2011.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REBECCA, REBECCA, REBECCA. Thank you for each of the thousands of hours of nightly conversation. Thank you for your mind, your work ethic, your patience, your way of connecting with people, your editing, your confidence, your humor, your insights, your eyes. Thank you for our children and for your love. YAMAAF.
My baby boy, Whitman Peace Hobbs: we are so happy that you came to us, and we hope that you grow up with Rob’s intelligence, generosity, loyalty, humor—and with much more peace in your life.
Lucy: I love you to the moon and back and back to the moon and back again and back to the moon and back again . . .
Sara Nelson is the smartest and kindest person I know. Thank you for your time, advocacy, generosity, and spirit.
David Black read a very short and insufficient outline of an idea, and he saw what, with a few thousand hours of work, that idea could become. In the process, he taught me how to shape a very hard-to-wrangle narrative, and—most important—how to ask the questions that haven’t been asked and are thus the easiest to avoid asking. He did so insightfully, patiently, and with unceasing belief in the importance of Rob’s story. I will always be grateful.
Rob’s many, many friends from his hometown of Newark have spent many, many hours rendering their memories to me: the joyful, the funny, the touching, and the tremendously painful. None of it was easy, and all of you dug deep. Jason, Demien, Tamba, Shannon, Lisa, Dawn, Julio, LaQuisha, Hrvoje, Marina, Roy, Darlene, Ina, Lana, Rene, Mrs. Gamble, Big Steve, Victor, and of course the Burger Boyz: Curtis, Tavarus, Drew, Flowy—and the youngest member, Christopher.
I am equally grateful to Rob’s friends from Yale: Daniella, Lamar, Simon, Danny, Sherman, Alejandra, Yesenia, Laurel, Arthur, Helen, Ty, Dan, Phil, Albert, Tasha, Adanna, Anthony, Isabella, Nevine, Cliff, Nick, Pablo, Armando, Zina, Katrina, Jacinta, Anwar, and Mike.
At Yale, Dean Jeffrey Brenzel contributed greatly to my understanding of not only the minority experience in college, but of the larger role a college such as Yale aims to have in the shaping of its students’ minds. My sister Lindsay, Amin Gonzalez, Harvey Goldblatt, Christa Dove, Derrick Gilbert, Dr. Iona Black, Dr. Elias Lolis, Nelson Donegan—thank you all for giving your time and insights into Rob’s years in New Haven.
Friar Edwin Leahy, Coach Wayne Ridley, Marc Onion, Truman Fox, Dexter Lopina, Charles Cawley—one of the greatest pleasures of this book has been the window it gave into St. Benedict’s and the devotion with which you treat your special school.
Mike Pallardy, Cory Booker, Ron Howell, Carl Herman, Thomas Lechliter, Albert Kapin, Mary Gibbons, Leroy Franklin, John Armeno, Louis Seppola—whether you were explaining the logistics of governing a city such as Newark, sharing with me how you police it, guiding me through New Jersey’s largest prison (as a guard or as an inmate), or recalling the intricacies of a murder trial that took place twenty-three years ago, you have all helped me—and, hopefully, the reader—understand the environment in which Rob grew up.
Mom, Dad, Bryan, Kelly, Lindsay, Michael, Andy, Clare, Grandma—I do not forget for a moment how fortunate I am to be a part of such a big, kind, funny family.
Nor do I forget the fortune I have in being married to one. Martin and Ruth Goldstein, Emily Learnard, Batab, Lanie, Ann-Marie, Pixie, Ruthie, Matt—thank you all for your support and love through all things.
Many others have helped bring this book to completion in both direct and indirect ways: Daniel Riley, Corrie and Ken Nolan, Sam Radin, Alyssa Bachner, Marty Scott, Bellinda Scott, Rawson Thurber, Sarah Koplin, Sarah Treem, Jay Carson, Michelle Weiner, Joy Gorman, Nick Wettels, Jess Lappin, Andy Wuertele, Russell Hollander, Sarah Smith, Lisa Rivlin, Cynthia Merman, Katrina Diaz, and Kate Lloyd.
I have relied on a few books to illuminate the broader canvas that Rob’s life traversed, most notably How Newark Became Newark: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City by Brad R.
Tuttle, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, and Race and Class Matters at an Elite College by Elizabeth Aries. Also the documentaries Brick City, created by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin, and Street Fight by Marshall Curry are both very powerful and multilayered views of modern-day Newark.
Oswaldo Gutierrez toured me through the physical and emotional landmarks of his hometown of Newark, as well as those of his alma mater, Yale University. More than anyone else, he helped me build a kind of bridge between these two worlds, and to capture the largely invisible burden that inhabiting both of them places on the individuals who are able to do so.
This entire endeavor began with what was intended to be a short, cathartic visit with Raquel Diaz not long after Rob’s funeral, which turned into an eight-hour-long conversation in her living room in Spanish Harlem while the rain poured down outside. Raquel, you have remained almost as close to this book as I have, and the insightfulness of your questions has never ceased (nor have the questions themselves).
My editor, Colin Harrison, is just about perfect at doing what he does. Whether you were answering my questions, asking me your much smarter questions, steering both my research and my writing with a gentle yet unrelenting hand, editing text with attention paid to every single word, or simply leaving me alone to work—I don’t believe the editorial experience could have been more satisfying or that I could be more thankful. Your “Nice job” means more to me than you know. Above all, I thank you for believing that Rob Peace’s story was worth telling in this form, for having the sensitivity to want to understand who he was and why he made the decisions he did.