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

by Jeff Hobbs

ASIDE FROM A few failed attempts to strike out on her own, Jackie Peace had lived on Chapman Street in Orange, New Jersey, since 1960, when she was eleven.

The first time I visited Jackie Peace to discuss telling her late son's story in some form was the weekend after Thanksgiving in 2011. We sat in the parlor of her home, and she was gracious and kind. At the time, we were talking about the idea of writing a few anecdotes for Rob's high school newsletter or something like that. I tried to be honest about the fact that I didn't know what I was doing journalistically (I didn't), that even talking gently about her son's life would be really painful (it was), that it would be hard to publish such a sad, hard story about a non-famous person in any more widespread way (it was), and my own whiteness would likely be uncomfortable for some people in his orbit (she laughed and said, "I'm sitting right across from you in my house; I can see that you're white.") In the end, she was moved that people still cared about her son, and she supported the idea of writing something. What I anticipated would be about two weeks of time spent talking to eight or ten people and writing 1,000 words turned into over three years, nearly one hundred people, and around 1,600 typed, single-spaced interview transcripts (though I did not record interviews with Jackie). I think of this book as a eulogy that got way out of hand. For more general info about the book, Rob's scholarship fund, and my next book entitled Show Them You're Good, visit: www.lifeofrobertpeace.com

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 cri...

The record of Robert Douglas vs. The State of New Jersey exists in the microfiche library at the state law library in Trenton, NJ. From beginning to end, the document was about 4,000 pages transcribing Skeet's trial from beginning to end. It took about a week of driving up and down New Jersey to locate, another week to read on the old library machine, and another week to read again. The document was only one of many sources in reporting this section of the book, but it was stark and chilling. People ask me often if I believe Skeet was guilty. There is really no way to know for sure, over thirty years after a crime that wasn't investigated or litigated very thoroughly in the first place. What remains absolutely clear is that Skeet Douglas did not receive a fair trial because he was black and didn't have money. That the judge basically said as much, publicly and in court, is haunting.

As group leader, Rob gave the keynote address. He’d rehearsed at home with his mother, and his deep voice didn’t falter as he spoke of this journey they were near to completing, the reliance they’d placed on one another along the way, the gift of manhood that the St. Benedict’s tradition had imparted to them. He was striking to all: muscular, focused, commanding. But what struck Charles Cawley was not Rob’s speech but Friar Leahy’s introduction. The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and now was among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn’t knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale.

The weeks spent at St. Benedict's talking with people who had taught Rob or gone to school with him were some of the most meaningful of my working life. The school is a special place. This part of the work on Rob's story in fact inspired my second non-fiction book, entitled SHOW THEM YOU'RE GOOD: FOUR BOYS AND THE QUEST FOR COLLEGE, which explores the experiences of students in different spaces from very different backgrounds as they move through high school--what it looks like and feels like to be on the cusp of adulthood right now. The paperback comes out on August 18th. I find that particular passage in life, when you are no longer young but not quite old, to be kind of astonishing in its wonder and humility.

I ENTERED MY NEW HOME, a quad on the fourth floor of Lanman-Wright Hall, with both of my parents trailing behind me.

Placing myself in this story was really difficult, because I'm aware of how minor a role I played in the great scheme of Rob's life, and because memoir was never a form I would typically even contemplate. In fact, I tried for a long time to leave myself out of the book or be "clever" about referencing myself discreetly. In the end, it became clear that there was no way around including myself as a character--that I had to, in a sense, own the fact that I had chosen to tell this story.

Our sophomore dorm room was less tranquil, looking as though a bomb composed of dirty laundry, CDs, and aluminum take-out food containers had detonated.

It really was bad...

“I can’t deal with your dumb shit anymore,” Oswaldo said. “You do dumb shit and you know it’s dumb shit but it’s the same dumb shit you grew up around so you do it anyway. I’m done.” Oswaldo was dealing with his own shit, in fact, shit that would land him in a white room in Yale’s Psychiatric Institute a few weeks later. His brain had begun to crumple under the weight it had to bear: his spiraling family in Newark; his affluent, oblivious classmates whose constant whining about how hard their lives were made him want to turn a gun on them; the daily financial planning involved in keeping up with his tuition payments and the growing debt load in his name; the ever-approaching moment when graduation came and he would be faced with trying to keep his life moving upward—and all of this before he even cracked a textbook to study for his 400-level psychology curriculum.

I remember once driving around Newark with Oswaldo during the research for this story. He was showing me around some places that had been important to Rob. I was sort of gratuitously blathering about my own struggles with writing this book, wondering aloud whether I had any right to despite the support of his mother and so many others, questioning whether or not Rob himself would want his story told: some pretty heavy and unanswerable questions. Oswaldo grew a little irritated with me and, while stopped at a red light, said, "Jeff, I can't give you permission to write this book, and I can't give you absolution. What I CAN do, if you would shut up for a minute, is help you UNDERSTAND."

He offered me a hit. I shrugged, sure. We sat and got stoned, maybe for fifteen minutes or so. We must have talked, but about what I will never remember. Most likely, we just bullshitted without much allusion to the fact that this was it. College was over. On to the next thing, whatever that was. These moments, our last as roommates, were very calm.

I had to warn my own mom before this book was published that I smoked pot with Rob a few times in college...

In August, he offered Rob a job teaching biology to freshmen and sophomores. “It could be good for a minute,” Rob said, almost resignedly. He and Curtis were sitting on the hood of Curtis’s car, smoking a joint amid the cherry blossom groves of Branch Brook Park. He approached the decision scientifically, reducing it to pros and cons. Pros: it was (barely) a living wage, a place and people he knew well, he would be very good at it, the job would look decent on a résumé, he’d have plenty of time off to travel and figure out his life. Cons: it was (barely) a living wage, the kids would annoy the hell out of him, the work would probably be more taxing than he thought, teaching at this level wasn’t what he wanted to do. “How much they pay?” Curtis asked. “Twenty-seven five.” Curtis nodded. He was making $40,000 a year in an entry-level position at a marketing firm, and he saw something fundamentally wrong with a world in which Rob Peace was earning 30 percent less. “You’ll have fun,” he said finally, “but just don’t, like . . .” “Don’t what?” Rob asked. “Don’t get stuck there.”

The notion and meaning of "potential" runs throughout Rob's story but is really pertinent in this moment. The word is used ubiquitously in schools and is powerful as a motivator, but after a certain point in life it comes to symbolize, by definition, what you haven't accomplished yet. Rob chose to become a high school teacher for a number of reasons. It was not necessarily his calling, but he was skilled at it, invested, and the job itself is a noble one. But because of the potential he'd carried and nurtured throughout childhood, this decision was perceived with a somewhat negative charge. Many of Rob's decisions after college, the good as well as the bad, had this negative charge that Rob struggled with. It speaks to how very important language is: the words we use and the different meanings these words have in different contexts.

In the basement of 34 Smith Street, where Curtis lived alone now, Rob invented his own personal strain of marijuana, an indica-sativa hybrid known widely as Sour Diesel.

Some readers have interpreted this sentence as claiming that Rob invented Sour Diesel. Trust that Rob woud be deeply offended if I were to credit him with that. I meant to explain that Rob created his own version of what was already a popular hybrid. The recreational cannabis market was decriminalized in New Jersey in February of 2021, almost a decade after Rob's death.

He’d been to Seoul, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Croatia, and places they couldn’t remember. He was always at his most peaceful before leaving on one of these sojourns, always at his most restless and uneasy upon his return.

I did not physically visit any of the places where Rob spent so much time abroad. I gathered most of the details of these trips throughout the book from various friends he made (Rob was tremendous at making friends), most of whom were easy to connect with through social media and a little less easy to communicate with, first using physical translation difficulties, then learning WAY too late of a nifty application called Google Translate.

“My point is, this right here will be ours. This will be our gray area.”

Since this book was published, I've had the privilege of visiting many schools in many different places as something like the unlikely ambassador of Rob Peace. It is very powerful to talk about friendship and identity with young people, and to witness young people, through Rob's story, share some of their own stories. In these moments, I feel like Rob would be very glad to know that he was still helping people. One of the most moving subjects to discuss is this idea of this gray area. Kids of all backgrounds can struggle with this story and the fact that there are no clean lines, that point A doesn't always lead to B and then C, that life zigs and zags. It's messy being a person. They bring an awful lot of experiential wisdom to these conversation and have taught me many nuances of perspective. These school visits also really informed my next book, Show Them You're Good: Four Boys and the Quest for College.

The death of someone you know is so vastly different from reading of the same event happening to a stranger. You are familiar with your friend’s face and voice, and so you are haunted, during the overstimulated state of being wide awake at four in the morning, by the very specific expressions and sounds he might have made as a bullet, perhaps more than one, passed into his body. The terrible resoluteness of this passage had likely happened not long after my wife and I, three thousand miles away, had undergone our nightly square dance—one flosses while the other brushes, then switch—padding softly on the floorboards so as not to wake our little girl.

"Why?" is the question I've most often been asked in different forms: Why did Rob die? Why did I write this book? The answer to the former remains somewhat simple if insufficient: He died as the result of ninety seconds of chaos, because he lived in a world where bad luck and bad decisions could be fatal. The answer to the latter is harder. It is not as if I went to Rob's funeral planning to write a book about his life. Rather, at the funeral, dozens of people came together and did the best they could to celebrate a life the way people have always celebrated life: through storytelling. Then the funeral ended and everyone went home, but we kept telling those stories. A community of people from all over the world formed who did not want to let Rob go. I was a small, small part of this community, but at a certain point I foolishly volunteered to compile a few of these stories in a way that spoke to Rob's life, and not just his death. That was how I came to be in Rob's mother's parlor, as I recounted earlier, and that's how this book came to be.

And once that happened, they wondered where each would fall.

This was a really, really special moment to be a part of, bittersweet as it was...I really, really miss Rob.