Read The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace for Free Online Page B

until proven guilty.
    â€œHow’s our boy?” Skeet asked.
    â€œHe’s good,” she replied. Soon their allotted minutes were up, too few for him, too many for her.

    T HE MURDER VICTIMS , sisters Charlene and Estella Moore, had been in their twenties. Charlene’s infant son had been in the apartment, along with a third woman who had been shot in the face and arm but survived. (Jackie’s underlying hope was that this woman had witnessed the violence and would clear Skeet’s name; she didn’t know yet that the survivor, Georgianna Broadway, had identified Skeet as the murderer in the hours following the shootings.) Jackie couldn’t help visualizing the scene. She had no context, and so, while lying wide awake in the middle of the night, she would make up scenarios that varied in detail but all shared the same expressions of disbelief or denial among the victims, the same pleas of “Don’t” or “Why?” and the same silence that must have settled in the moments after, interrupted by the unharmed and suddenly motherless baby’s cries. She would think these thoughts and, when morning came, stare at her own son and hold him tight, to the point where he’d squirm away and say, “Ma, c’mon now.” As he’d grown, he’d become less responsive to physical affection in the way boys did once toughness became a desirable quality.
    Rob was very tough, and he had been making a name for himself in neighborhood football games on weekends. These games were played in the street, with the lines of parked cars forming sidelines (these sidelines were considered “in play,” such that one could be pushed or tripped or outright tackled against one). Rob was neither fast nor agile, but he had broad shoulders with premature muscle mass. He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street—especially when he punctuated the hit with the words “Patent that!” (He didn’t know what a patent was, but the expression was used among his father’s friends when something clever had been said.) This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution. Neighbors would watch from second-floor windows, and Rob imagined that these were the upper decks of the Meadowlands, where the New York Giants played, and he was Lawrence Taylor, a Giants linebacker so athletic and mean that NFL coaches were currently reinventing their entire offensive philosophies, not to stop him but simply to slow him down.
    East Orange, with congested traffic and little in the way of street greenery to oxygenate the atmosphere and provide shade, could feel poisonously humid during the late summers. Visible waves of heat clung to the blacktop. Men walked around bare chested with their shirts hanging like rags from their low-slung belts. Malt liquor in tall, cold glass bottles was passed around groups of stoop-sitters, often offered as refreshments to the boys playing football. A positive energy coursed through the neighborhood, because up and down and across the grid of residential city streets, everyone was outside. Plumes of dark smoke that smelled of seasoned meat rose above the houses from backyard cookouts. Elderly women opened their front windows wide and sat there all day behind fans that blew across bowls of ice cubes. Cards, dice, checkers, jacks, jump rope, hopscotch, craps, step dance–offs, stickball, handball, basketball—one could not turn a corner without encountering a game being played, often with the elderly cheering on the young, dispensing their peanut gallery wisdom gained from decades of playing the same games on the same blocks. Because of all these crowds, it was the safest time of