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

by Jeff Hobbs

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.