The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

by Jeff Hobbs

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!”

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.

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.

Rob moved around the fringes of the various gatherings, emptying the trash cans and picking up the plastic cups, napkins, and spilled food. Like the very first week of school, nobody looked at him and assumed he was anything other than a janitor. Unlike the first week of school, he was one. After the reunion cleanup was complete, he went back to work in the med school lab, where he assisted in researching the pharmacology of proteins that led to infectious disease, inflammation, and cancer. His primary focus was on the structural biology of chemokines—protein receptors secreted by cells to recruit an immune response to the site of an infection. Using X-ray crystallography, Rob spent the summer and fall isolating the CXCL12 (SDF-1alpha) and vMIP-II/vCCL2 chemokines for the GPCR CXCR4 coreceptor for HIV-1. This particular receptor also mediated metastasis in a number of cancers, as well as a mutation responsible for an immunosuppressive disease known as WHIM syndrome. The applications included stem cell transplantation and the production of medicines to halt the takeover of these afflictions. In our dorm room, we had always joked admiringly about the fact that Ty Cantey—who was now preparing for a yearlong fellowship at Cambridge, England, before undergoing a seven-year MD-PhD program at Harvard Med School—was destined to cure cancer someday. I had no idea that Rob, in the lab he’d walked to almost every day during junior and senior years, was actually helping to do it.

They embraced and began speaking in rapid Portuguese. Curtis gradually gleaned that Paolo was not simply a custodial employee of the city tourism department. He’d actually built the stairs himself, with his father, sixty years earlier. Now he lived with his wife in a one-room cabin near the base of the steps, and every day he worked to maintain the stairway. Later, Rob and Curtis ate dinner in that cabin, spicy stewed pork served over rice. Rob and Paolo kept a running conversation in Portuguese that Curtis couldn’t understand as Rob finished bowl after bowl of stew.

But within his consciousness, his friends believed him to feel extraordinarily sensitive toward this widespread plight in the city in which he’d grown up, and perhaps even guilty in knowing that, had he not been born with his particular brain and his particular mother, he wouldn’t be any different from these people. And maybe that was why he stopped providing them with weed.

At the time, Rob’s day-to-day seemed like a sitcom to them: Yale grad high school teacher running a marijuana lab out of his best friend’s basement in Illtown.

“You didn’t go to college so you could carry people’s luggage,” Jackie said, not sniping necessarily but simply telling him the truth. “You don’t even need a high school diploma to do this job.”

Her debating points were logical and immediate: he was a Yale graduate, a scientist, a teacher, one who had benefited from the sacrifices of others, so what the hell was he doing working the lowest-level job in the entire airport?

And Ina gradually understood that Rob didn’t seem capable of seeing the big picture, the way he had when they’d first met. He trafficked almost exclusively in the day-to-day: this shift at work, this flight, this city, this transaction, this chunk of money. No matter how skillfully he was able to string these moments together and stretch them into future years, he nevertheless struck her as inextricably lodged within the minute in which he was living. And never more so than when he asked for her help in a new venture, which involved guns.

She was confused by all this talk of buying her a house. She’d lived at 181 Chapman Street for almost fifty years. She’d been poor for the same amount of time. That was the life she knew, and she was more or less content with it. She didn’t understand how her strong, bright boy could bring himself such discouragement trying to change what she had; she didn’t understand why he couldn’t hear her on the rare instances she’d tried to explain it to him.

Oswaldo Gutierrez knew. He was almost finished with med school at Penn, and he’d seen Rob plenty over the last few years, as Rob would loop through Philadelphia after visits to the Raymond brothers in Browns Mills. For the most part, these visits were easy. Together for a night, they could smoke and chill and just talk, complaining some, commiserating, thinking out loud. But as 2009 began, Oswaldo noticed a circular aspect to Rob’s speech and manners, a narrowing of vision in a man who, in college, had been more curious and knowledgeable than seemingly any of the five thousand Yale undergraduates surrounding him. Like the planes that circled above the airport when the ground crew caused runway delays, he fell into a holding pattern of carping about his life while hunched over a joint on Oswaldo’s sofa: tenants, rent, Carl, women, work, money, even his mother. His laments were small and tiresome—this motherfucker . . . that motherfucker . . . I’m so tired of all this stupid-ass shit, man—and yet they instilled a deep sadness in Oswaldo as he, in the analytical way of the psychiatrist he was studying to become, isolated the man he had first encountered at Yale and placed him alongside the one bemoaning the annoyances of his life here, now, seven years later.

He could trace the many events and patterns that, though sometimes innocuous in the happening, had accumulated with a rigid scientific surety to produce this man, whose generosity and intelligence were matched only by his flaws.

And Rob was still clinging, after all these years, to the idea of being the Man. Oswaldo was no longer interested in seeing what that looked like up close.

My insatiable curiosity led me to Yale University where I majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

In addition to the various lectures and lab courses I studied to complete my major, I had the opportunity to conduct research in the labs of two principal investigators. I worked with Dr. Diane Krauss during the summer of 1999 while participating in Yale’s Science Technology and Research Scholars Program (STARS).

In February of 2000 I joined the lab of Dr. Elias Lolis, where I was teamed up with a graduate student and was trained on how to use the different equipment.

The weekly lab meetings and talks with my advisor helped me maintain my focus and work through the different complications that arose. After I graduated, I continued in the Lolis lab until February 2003.

“Cut off your dreads,” Oswaldo told him. “Get a suit that fits right, that’s not all baggy and hip-hop. Make eye contact. Don’t mumble, don’t swear, don’t talk around the topic. Act interested.” “What does that mean?” “When you’re not one hundred percent into something, you have a tendency to act above it all. Don’t do that. Interviewers can tell, and it pisses them off.”

Rob wasn’t cold-blooded enough to be a truly successful drug dealer. Oswaldo had known people who were. Growing up, his uncle had been friends with a bona fide kingpin. The man lived in a three-story town house on Bleecker Street, in Manhattan. He had a wife and children and a circle of friends to whom he was kind, loyal, and generous. He also wouldn’t have hesitated to put a bullet in the head of anyone who even obliquely crossed him—hence the wealth he possessed and, more important, the respect. Rob cared about people too much to move anywhere near that place. He cared about their stories, their families, their needs. He wasn’t dangerous or lethal.

He was hoping to lump these two eventualities—job and school—together by applying to a Leadership Development Program at Johnson & Johnson. He was revising the personal statement he’d sent Isabella for the application to this program. If Rob was accepted, he would start at the company as a bench worker—mixing simple chemicals and taking care of lab equipment, which was his first role in the lab at Yale—while concurrently earning a graduate degree at NYU, with the tuition paid for by Johnson & Johnson in return for a long-term contract. He was confident that he would be accepted to the program.

This matter involved what, to all of them, and to Rob in particular, could be the opportunity of a lifetime: fifty pounds of bulk marijuana that could be obtained, through Curtis’s connect, at an up-front cost of $4,000 apiece—less than 10 percent of the market rate. All told, they stood to profit in the vicinity of $400,000 in a few months’ time—a 2,000 percent return, enough to take care of their mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends, and children for more than a year. Enough to buy suits for job interviews. Enough to not have to hustle for the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever again.

“I’VE ALWAYS LOOKED UP to you,” Ty Cantey said into the phone. Ty and Raina were living in San Jose for a portion of their residencies.

She told Carl to stay with Frances, and she drove downtown, nearly the same route she’d taken to St. Benedict’s on the days she’d dropped Rob off. She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son’s face. She nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s Shawn, that’s my son.” From there, she drove straight to work.

Dr. Iona Black, Dr. Elias Lolis, Nelson Donegan—thank you all for giving your time and insights into Rob’s years in New Haven.