The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (5 page)

Late on that Friday night, Georgianna Broadway and her roommate, Deborah Neal, went to visit the Moore sisters at 7 Chestnut Street in East Orange. The four women took turns holding Charlene's four-month-old baby boy, they drank cocktails and malt liquor, they danced and complained about work and men and poverty—until midnight, when Georgianna took Deborah home to the house they shared on Palm Street. Georgianna then proceeded to 17th Avenue in Newark, one of the most dangerous areas of the city, to buy $40 worth of cocaine. She returned to the Moores' apartment at around one fifteen. At that
point, Estella left with a man named Mervin Matthews to go drink at a nearby bar. Georgianna and Charlene sat together in the dining area. Georgianna drank Colt 45 malt liquor; Charlene drank rum and Coke. Both smoked cocaine while the baby slept in the crib in the bedroom. Georgianna smoked regularly, and so her highs lasted only fifteen minutes. For four hours, while Charlene nodded off, Georgianna had hit after hit, until $40 had been cooked into her respiratory and nervous systems. The baby cried but fell back to sleep.

When Estella came home with Mervin at five thirty on Saturday morning, Georgianna asked if she could sleep there. She'd been up for twenty-four straight hours that had begun with a full workday. In the bedroom, with the crib at their feet, Georgianna and Charlene curled up together, backs to the door. They slept.

On his way home, Mervin Matthews stopped to buy cigarettes and realized he still had Estella's keys, so he returned to Chestnut Street at six o'clock to return them. He encountered Skeet Douglas standing in front of the entrance of the complex with another man. Mervin knew who Skeet was and assumed that he had interrupted a drug transaction, so he tried to slip past them casually, but Skeet entered the building with him. Skeet's apartment, 2D, stood perpendicular to the sisters in 2E at the end of the hall. The two men went into their respective doors. Estella was still awake, Charlene and Georgianna sleeping, but Mervin stayed only a minute or two. When he left, Skeet joined him again on his way back outside, saying that he was waiting for a pickup to take him to Newark International for an eight o'clock flight to North Carolina, where he had family—though he carried no luggage.

Georgianna woke up at seven thirty, groggy and cotton mouthed and with an angry pulsation in her head, all that pleasure she'd stoked fewer than two hours ago replaced by deep aches and pains. She heard voices down the hallway, probably from the kitchen, a man and a woman. Charlene still slept soundly beside her, the baby asleep in the crib. When Estella came into the bedroom, Georgianna asked her for some food. Estella brought her leftover Chinese from the refrigerator. Georgianna
then requested salt. Estella, apparently too distracted by whatever exchange was happening in the kitchen to be annoyed, went and grabbed the salt, which would be Estella Moore's final movement on this earth. She returned to the darkened bedroom with a salt shaker and what Georgianna would later describe as a “scared look.”

Then the bedroom door opened. Five shots were fired immediately, in quick succession. Estella fell first, onto the floor, a single bullet embedded in her brain. Charlene, who had rocketed upward out of her sleep, fell next, into mortal repose behind Georgianna, bullet holes in her chest and head. Georgianna felt a kick in her arm and a sharp sting beneath her chin as the bullet ricocheted upward off her humerus bone, and she fell backward off the far side of the bed without ever glimpsing the shooter.

At nine thirty, 911 dispatch received a call from Deborah Neal's home on Palm Street. Georgianna was there with Charlene's baby, wearing Estella's blood-soaked trench coat. The police and an ambulance arrived at the same time, and before Georgianna was taken to University Hospital she told Officer Alfred Rizzolo that “Skeet” shot her in apartment 2E of 7 Chestnut, and there were two dead bodies at the location. None of the responders understood why Georgianna, critically injured, had chosen to drive there on her own, why she hadn't sought a neighbor's help on Chestnut Street, why she hadn't gone straight to East Orange Hospital, less than a block from the building where she'd been wounded.

Three police officers pulled up to the Chestnut Street address at nine forty. They proceeded inside with caution. The doorway to 2E was wide open, and the inner hallway was spackled with blood. They found the bodies in the bedroom, still very warm. They searched the apartment according to protocol and found no weapons, just the remnants of the previous night of drinking and drug use, an infant's playpen, Georgianna's Chinese food barely touched on the bedside table. Because the dispatcher had alerted them to the possible suspect residing in 2D, they moved on—carefully—into Skeet's apartment, the door to which had been ajar when they'd arrived.

In 2D, they found absolute squalor, which the lead officer, Michael Brown, would later liken to that of an unclean, unsupervised child: dirty clothes everywhere, filthy dishes and rotten food, naked lightbulbs, and torn, stained furniture. Since there was no sign of any physical struggle or burglary, they could only assume that this was how the suspect lived day to day. On a table, they found scales, glass bowl pipes, a razor blade and spoons dusted with cocaine residue, a bag of marijuana, a plastic container of cocaine, an empty black gun holster on a chain buried beneath dirty clothes, two black cestuses (fighting gloves weighted with iron studs), and a thick Rolodex.

By now, investigators and medical personnel had begun arriving, including Captain John Armeno and Detective Sergeant Alan Sierchio. Without a warrant, they were permitted only to “look around” the apartment, specifically for weapons. They found no firearms, but Captain Armeno did gravitate toward a conspicuous framed photo lying on its side on a built-in shelf. In the photo, Skeet Douglas wore a bright green tuxedo complete with top hat, and—bizarrely—he was swinging a bejeweled cane. Armeno immediately sent this photo to University Hospital, where Georgianna was lying on a gurney in the emergency room, in critical condition due to shock and blood loss. She had been intubated and couldn't speak. But she remained conscious, and when asked whether she knew the person responsible for the shootings, she nodded. The officer took out the photograph and asked her whether the pictured person was the shooter. She nodded again and began to cry. Later, she would admit that she had never actually seen who pulled the trigger, but she would claim to have recognized Skeet's voice talking to Estella in the kitchen. She'd met Skeet once, a week before the murders, when he'd come over to the sisters' apartment to fix their faulty door.

That same afternoon, Detective Sergeant Sierchio used this exchange to obtain an official search warrant for 2D and access Skeet's Rolodex. A short time later, Frances Peace received the call inquiring as to Skeet's whereabouts, and she relayed this to both Jackie and Carl.

The following day, using information gleaned from Skeet's Rolodex, Detective Sergeant Sierchio and three uniformed officers knocked on Irving Gaskins's third-floor apartment door. Mr. Gaskins, seventy-eight years old and a longtime friend of Skeet's family, lived on 13th Street in Newark proper, a few blocks from Branch Brook Park, where Rob was currently enrolled in the summer camp. They were admitted entry by a woman. In the apartment, a group of children played on the floor. Mr. Gaskins was hooked to an oxygen tank due to a combination of emphysema, diabetes, and heart disease. The suspect, Robert “Skeet” Douglas, was seated nearby, and after a brief, charged confrontation during which Mr. Gaskins begged the police not to shoot—because a stray bullet might explode his oxygen tank and harm his grandchildren—Skeet was put in handcuffs. According to the police report, the arresting officers found a .38 caliber Taurus Spesco revolver tucked in Skeet's pants, loaded with six rounds of ammunition, with five more live rounds in his pocket. In the days following, ballistics experts would confirm that striations on the bullets removed from the murdered women's bodies exactly matched those within the flute of this revolver, and in turn the revolver had unique markings etched on the outer surface of the barrel that matched the holster found in Skeet's apartment.

At his desk in the prosecutor's office, Thomas Lechliter reviewed dozens of transcripts and reports, photographs, and inventory lists, and he constructed a clear narrative of the murders. As he did so, his confidence grew that not only would this evidence lead to a conviction, but also that a conviction would represent justice in the world. In other words, the defendant was guilty. He did not overlook the many loose ends presented within the story: the single witness who had been inebriated, strung out, severely overtired, and hungover at the time of the murders, and who had identified a suspect, by voice only, whom she had encountered once in her life and never spoken to directly; the very odd time lapse between when the murder was said to have taken place—seven thirty—and when Georgianna's roommate had first called
the police two hours later (the warmth of the dead bodies upon police arrival did not help explain that, either); a suspect who, though a known drug dealer, had neither prior convictions nor any history of violence; the less-than-kosher initial police search of apartment 2D, the tuxedo picture illegally taken from the scene, and conflicting police statements as to when the gun holster had actually been found—before the warrant was issued or after (because the holster had been concealed by dirty clothes, finding it before the warrant would have required more than the quick, noninvasive search granted by law); the fact that not one of the interviews conducted so far had alluded to anything resembling a motive.

All of these questions would be sufficiently answered, Lechliter was sure, before the case went to trial. In the meantime he had the murder weapon, found on the suspect's person at the time of arrest, and that was really all he needed to win. That, and for Skeet Douglas to obtain legal representation, so that the requisite filings, hearings, appeals, motions, pleas, movements, selections, and—ultimately—the trial of
State of New Jersey
v.
Robert Douglas
could commence.

J
ACKIE TRIED TO
hold her son's hand on the bus ride to Essex County Jail, but he wouldn't let her. He gazed out the windows at autumnal Newark flashing past. Most of the other passengers were women in their late teens and early twenties en route to see boyfriends, husbands, brothers. The rest were older, probably parents. Rob was the lone child.

Jackie hadn't wanted to bring him so soon, but Skeet had been adamant. He'd used so many of his daily fifteen minutes of phone time—minutes that were supposed to be used to contact lawyers—to call her instead, demanding to see his son, that she'd finally given in. “I'm his father, he loves me, he can see me as I am,” Skeet told her. “I'm not guilty and I'm not ashamed.”

At the jail, Rob walked the same path she'd walked a few times already, past the same checkpoints and the same gatekeepers, until he was watch
ing his father through the glass. Never before had their likeness struck her so strongly, and it loosened valves within her, the ones that kept her darker feelings contained. Even here, the boy emulated his father, the way he held the handset loosely to his ear, his other elbow propped on the counter, head angled down, words spoken in a low mumble.

Skeet asked, “How are you doing, little man?”

Rob told him about street football, summer camp, and first grade starting at Oakdale. Skeet promised that he would call him every day, that he would be here whenever Rob was able to visit, that he would be home very soon.

“Hey,” Skeet said, just before their time was up, “you know I didn't do anything wrong, right? You know I'm innocent?”

“Yeah,” Rob replied, his confidence unwavering. In that moment, Jackie almost believed Skeet, too.

S
CHOOL BEGAN
, and Jackie tried to treat the changing days and seasons normally, for her son's sake. She walked him to school, bused herself to work, and met him back at home. She was worried about his learning progress, both because his teachers were less than inspired and because of the emotional trauma he was enduring. With Skeet's help and his own motivation, Rob had always been able to bridge the gap between his own drive and the lack thereof at Oakdale Elementary. Jackie tried to fill Skeet's role doing homework, but she wore out easily. After long days taking orders in the kitchen, she didn't generally have the strength to give orders at home. Over the following months, Rob began gaining weight—“husky,” she started calling him—and acting lazy. Coming home and seeing her seven-year-old splayed on the sofa, half asleep with his books unopened and watching junk on TV, reminded her of every man around the neighborhood whom she wanted nothing to do with. And yet she hadn't built up the heart to push Rob forward from this event the way Jackie was pushing herself forward. Usually, she simply
dropped on the sofa next to him and watched whatever he was watching. Whenever she felt sorry for herself, she tried to think of Skeet, seven miles away, alone in a cell. Whenever she felt really sorry for herself, she thought of the Moore sisters.

Then she was in the school principal's office, with Rob sitting hunched beside her, his blood still hot, muttering breathy little resignations to himself, “I don't care if they kick me out, that boy's a fool.”

In the winter of first grade, Rob had had his first fistfight, on the front steps outside Oakdale Elementary. Fights weren't uncommon, and the faculty didn't treat them very seriously. But they'd still called Jackie at work. To her chagrin, no one at the school asked for a disciplinary meeting. So Jackie demanded one herself, left work, and walked to Lincoln Avenue. Throughout the curt discussion that followed (she felt the administrators were humoring her so they could go home), she visualized the scene: two seven-year-old bodies in winter coats tumbling down the concrete steps into dirtied snowbanks, arms flailing and profanity in play, while fellow students and young male passersby from the surrounding neighborhood chanted encouragement (“C'mon, li'l man, kick his ass!”). They were two little boys pretending to be men.