The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (49 page)

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did not attend the funeral or any of the festivities that followed. Jackie requested their absence, and Nathan communicated this wish to them two days after Rob's death. Flowy and Drew were mad at first, especially when they learned that the funeral was going to be at St. Benedict's. The placement and their nonattendance made them look culpable, they felt, in a community that remained important to them. They planned to go anyway.

“No, you're not doing that,” Tavarus told them. The day before, ­Tavarus had taken a sponge and a bucket downstairs. On his knees, using both hands to scrub deep into the textured flooring, he'd washed away Rob's blood.

“How are we gonna lose our boy and not go to his funeral?” Flowy asked. “I've seen that boy most every day of my life since we were fourteen.”

“Because this is a mother who lost her son, and she wants answers that none of us have, and we are going to do whatever the hell she wants,” Tavarus replied. “That's how.”

On the day of the funeral, they had their own small ceremony in the backyard, just a few yards from where Rob died. Police were still in and out, though less so as the days passed. They still hadn't filed charges against Curtis, who'd been released after three nights in the cell, but charges were imminent. The house was nearly clean of the mess left in the wake of the police search; this had taken days of work. No one ventured to comment on their surreal capacity to remain in the house, to eat and sleep there, and, now, to share a mournful blunt and toast to Rob. They still could not fully process the vacancy following Rob's death, the space that was not occupied by his broad shoulders, the silence that was not punctured by his voice. Christopher was riding his bike, the one Rob had given him years earlier, around the driveway. The bike was the perfect size for him now.

They couldn't avoid talking about that night. Whether or not those men had shown up with the intent to kill Rob would always remain unclear. That no one remembered hearing the shots that killed him meant that they must have been discharged as Curtis was running upstairs from the large man firing on him. They figured that during Curtis's failed intervention, whoever had a gun on Rob—a teenage neighbor who'd seen them leave said the second intruder had been a small, light-skinned guy with dreadlocks—must have turned around, and Rob must have made a move on him, perhaps thinking that his recent martial arts training gave him a better-than-average chance of gaining the upper hand. The Burger Boyz would never know if this had been the case, either. What Curtis did know was that if Rob hadn't been shot, then the intruders wouldn't have fled so quickly, and he would most likely be dead instead of—or in addition to—Rob. Tavarus, Darlene, and Christopher would have been vulnerable, too. Rob saved their lives. This was what they told themselves that night.

Curtis didn't contribute much to the dialogue. He abstained from alcohol and drugs in the event that the police showed up, and he spent most of that long afternoon rooted in the moment four nights earlier when he'd held and cradled his friend's lifeless body, a moment he would never leave.

The state medical examiner had pulled two .18 caliber bullets from Rob's torso. The first shot had entered his abdomen and lacerated the liver. The second had struck him squarely in the chest, pierced a coronary artery, and lodged in the back of his rib cage. Blood had immediately begun filling his chest cavity, causing a very painful buildup of pressure. Rob was most likely conscious for ninety seconds or so, but his brain, which he had strived to dull so many thousands of times with marijuana, would have begun shutting down into a foggy state almost immediately from the drop in blood pressure. He had clearly suffered severely in the moments before he closed his eyes for the last time, but he suffered silently; Curtis had heard neither a cry nor a groan following the gunshots. Maybe, even then, he was thinking about his friends and
contained his pain, as he'd always managed to do, so as not to draw them down to the basement and into harm's way.

* * * 

Killed in apparent drug-related shooting,Yale alumnus remembered for leadership

Wherever he went, Robert Peace was a star.

His intellect and athletic skill carried him from the modest apartment he shared with his mother in Orange, to the halls of Newark's venerable St. Benedict's Academy, where he won the school's highest honor, and then to Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in molecular biochemistry.

Even when he was shot to death in a Newark house Wednesday, police say, he was not your garden variety drug dealer.

The 30-year-old Yale scientist was using his knowledge of biochemistry to bring in $1,000 a day selling marijuana grown in the basement of the Smith Street home where he was killed, said law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. . . .

Flowy's cell phone rang all morning the day the article was published in the
Newark Star-Ledger
; almost everyone he knew was telling him not to read it. They weren't worried so much about the article itself, the remainder of which briefly described police speculation regarding Rob's alleged drug distribution network, followed by a longer recap of all his past achievements at St. Benedict's and Yale. They were more concerned about Flowy seeing the online public comments that followed, which over the day of the article's release had degenerated into a kind of class warfare.

From opieisback: How you go from Yale to this, I don't know.

From drphil1: One word—MONEY. Not everyone who graduates from Yale becomes a success. Peace saw that he could make hundreds
of thousands of dollars manufacturing rather than working in a lab for peanuts. Of course he had to establish a distribution system that brought in more people including those that wanted a big piece of the action. His demise means his manufacturing operation is defunct and the distribution network he supported is disrupted.

From LADYFROMNJ30: This man was a loyal friend to many! This article was written by two idiots that have no clue as to what actually took place in this house . . . I have been to this home many times and know for a fact there was no ‘lab' in the basement . . . come on now are you serious? He didn't even live at this house!!!! At the end of the day, I am not here to go back and forth in an argument with anyone here. It's just sad that he lost his life, his family and friends have lost someone and this man is not even here to defend himself. The police monopolize on any opportunity to exploit the black man in Newark, and ANYONE with real common sense would know this and not post these ignorant comments about ‘education' being thrown away . . .

From Yo:
The police monopolize on any opportunity to exploit the black man in Newark . . .
Huh? Don't think because he was black that he was destined to be a criminal.

From FactsDon'tMatter: To the rest of the people here that THINK they know everything about Robert. You don't. You don't know that he was raised by a single mother that worked in a kitchen; you don't know the hardships he had to overcome, like having a father in prison. You don't know that he tried his hardest to get his dad out of that prison when he was terminally ill with cancer only to be turned down and then having to watch his father waste away and die behind bars. You don't know the many young men he inspired by being there for them and with them. You don't know the many young men he taught to swim. You don't know how he made chemistry assessable to those same kids. . . . You only know anecdotal clichés about drugs and fast money and consequences . . . I didn't know Robert well, but I knew of him as my son's Water Polo coach, a guy who pushed and cared for those kids that he coached. I know that I am saddened that a great light has been extinguished. I'm sad because he died alone. I'm sad because he'll no
longer be there to inspire another young gifted Black man to aspire to Yale and beyond. The rest of you can be happy, but those of us that knew Robert in any way at all are devastated. RIP ROB . . . Another Grey Bee gone too soon.
WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME
.

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 . . .”

A
SIDE 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.