Tavarus

Tavarus is one of the central members of the Burger Boyz and one of Rob Peace’s most enduring friends. His life runs alongside Rob’s from St. Benedict’s through adulthood, but it does not follow the same route: where Rob repeatedly converts intelligence and opportunity into new ventures, Tavarus faces more immediate financial and academic constraints, falls out of college, and tries to build a livelihood through real estate. Their friendship is therefore both intimate and practical, sustained by loyalty, shared history, business, and a common responsibility to the people of East Orange and Newark.

Identity and Background

Tavarus belongs to the group Rob, Drew, Flowy, and Curtis called the Burger Boyz because they spent the time between class and practice at Burger King. The name concealed a serious economic reality. Rob sometimes survived on ketchup packets rather than buying food, and Tavarus occasionally paid for him. Those purchases were also connected to marijuana business: Tavarus’s older brother could obtain larger quantities, and Tavarus gave Rob kickbacks for directing business his way. Their friendship thus developed within an economy of small favors, reciprocal obligations, and unequal need rather than outside material hardship.

At St. Benedict’s, Tavarus was small but fast, playing defense with Drew in the goal on the water-polo team. The team’s aggressive style became part of its identity as inner-city boys entering the pools of a privileged majority, and Tavarus participated in the mixture of athletic competitiveness, intimidation, and verbal defiance that defined the group. Academically, however, he began from a weak position: over two years he raised a 0.7 GPA to 2.1. Guidance counselors still urged the boys to imagine college, and the repeated promise of a scholarship briefly gave Tavarus a possible route forward.

Tavarus’s family history made that promise more fragile. His father had died of cancer four years before Curtis’s father died, and the deaths accumulated across the Burger Boyz: Flowy’s father, Drew’s father, Rob’s father, and the fathers of the other boys were gone as well. The friends wondered what grievance God held against the fathers and sons of East Orange. The loss was not only emotional. The men had represented supervision, practical help, and a visible model of adulthood, leaving the boys to negotiate ambition without the stability those fathers had provided.

Friendship and Early Adulthood

The summer of 1998 marked the last concentrated period before the friends scattered. Victor went to Daniel Webster College, Tavarus to the University of Georgia–Clarkson, Drew to Johnson C. Smith, and Curtis to Morehouse; Flowy could not afford college and instead found work as a lifeguard. Rob and the others returned to the Burger King near school for nostalgic lunches, while Rob had a sphinx tattooed on his right biceps from a drawing Victor made at a Fourth of July cookout. The tattoo and the lunches turned ordinary objects into markers of a shared adolescence that was about to become geographically and economically divided.

College did not stabilize Tavarus’s life. By the time the friends reunited, he was struggling academically and financially. He had spent months assembling loans, then confronted the interest rates and decades of repayment that made him question whether a college education could possibly be worth its cost. During junior-year Af-Am Week at Yale, Tavarus was already back in Newark after dropping out. He lived with his brother in a deteriorating apartment above and below Section 8 tenants and beside a significant drug den. He was trying to enter real estate, drawing on the title-research work he had found after high school, but his poor grades and dropout status narrowed the opportunities available to him.

That visit placed Tavarus and Flowy in an uncomfortable contrast with Rob’s Yale life. Tavarus had torn himself away from college and was uncertain about the future; Flowy had injured two ligaments in his knee while lifeguarding and had been unable to work for a month. The promising trajectories they had shared at St. Benedict’s had split into precarious adult circumstances. Tavarus’s later path would continue to oscillate between attempts at legitimate advancement and exposure to the criminal economy, while his connection to Rob remained one of the few durable structures spanning both worlds.

By adulthood, the Burger Boyz occupied different positions. Curtis was still following a five-year graduation plan at Morehouse, Flowy was lifeguarding, landscaping, and repairing cars, Drew worked in construction, and Victor had returned to southern New Jersey and taken a job at Home Depot while hoping to work for the FAA. Tavarus remained in real estate and began thinking about flipping houses, an idea Rob adopted because Rob possessed the start-up capital. The friends’ conversations were no longer simply about school or sports; they were about debt, employment, housing, children, and the difficulty of converting youthful promise into durable security.

Work, Risk, and Economic Strategy

Tavarus was an early conduit in Rob’s marijuana business. When Rob’s acquaintances asked him to obtain drugs, he refused to handle their requested amounts directly and told them to speak with Tavarus, whose older brother could supply real quantities. Tavarus lived with his grandmother, aunt, and numerous cousins in a small two-bedroom home on Halsted Street. Rob understood how badly Tavarus needed money, which made the unexpected twenty-dollar bill Tavarus slipped him a few days later significant: even while economically vulnerable, Tavarus still participated in a system of payment and reciprocity that bound the friends together.

The drug trade later became more unstable. Rob’s first supplier disappeared, probably to evade conflict with a rival, police, or both, and another source came through Carl in exchange for small kickbacks. Although Tavarus is not the supplier in that later arrangement, his earlier role helps establish the network through which Rob’s legitimate and illegal economic lives became intertwined. Tavarus understood the neighborhood’s informal markets from inside them, just as he understood the formal mechanisms of property ownership through title research. His knowledge was practical rather than credentialed, and it repeatedly became useful to Rob.

Tavarus eventually became Rob’s principal real-estate collaborator. After Rob renovated the Greenwood Avenue property and began earning approximately $1,000 per month from its three rented units, he wanted to expand beyond a single difficult property. The venture, Peace Realty, emerged from that experience and from Tavarus’s knowledge of housing. The two developed a plan centered on the Section 8 housing program, which Tavarus regarded skeptically because he had grown up around its residences and believed suburban landlords often charged Newark premium rents for severely neglected apartments. Their proposal was shaped by the Great Recession, when abandoned and foreclosed houses multiplied across the neighborhoods they called home.

The plan combined personal networks with labor and expertise. Rob and Tavarus listed potential investors, many of them St. Benedict’s alumni reachable through Friar Leahy. They spent days in the downtown Hall of Records researching Section 8 history and property values, then worked nights at the kitchen table on Smith Street, revising the proposal and arguing over its details. Curtis’s stepfather could help incorporate the company; Oswaldo’s father could renovate properties at a low rate; and Tavarus would perform title research. The project represented an effort to transform neighborhood knowledge, friendship, and school connections into legitimate capital, even though the partners had only limited entrepreneurial experience.

Conflict, Loyalty, and Moral Responsibility

Tavarus’s relationship with Rob was not merely supportive. He was among the people who could recognize Rob’s anger, ambition, and self-justifications because he had shared the conditions that produced them. When Rob spoke of creating a “gray area” in which a successful man could compromise ethically on the way to the top, he invoked hustlers, politicians, and presidents as examples. Tavarus was one of the friends listening to this argument. The conversation reveals the moral language surrounding their ventures: questionable acts could be presented not as simple greed but as necessary compromises in pursuit of success, independence, and the ability to help others.

That ethic of provision became especially visible when Rob resumed large-scale marijuana dealing. The first profits were distributed to Curtis, Tavarus, Drew, and Flowy to repay their investments. Rob also used his own proceeds to make back mortgage payments on the Greenwood house, contribute to Jackie, repair the Chapman Street house, and pay family credit-card debts related to Frances’s dialysis and emphysema. He again helped friends with rent, car repairs, and marijuana. Tavarus belonged to the circle in which criminal income was translated into care, investment, and obligation, even as the same income exposed everyone to escalating danger.

Tavarus’s own vulnerability intensified. He was arrested for possession with intent to distribute, an offense that placed him below the line Rob imagined himself crossing for his friends. Rob continued trying to be the “Man” among their peers, sending money for rent or children’s clothes and offering rides when cars broke down. Tavarus therefore occupied two positions at once: he was someone Rob tried to support, and he was a partner whose knowledge and labor Rob relied upon. Their bond could not be separated from the unequal risks and resources within their shared economic world.

Rob’s Death and Tavarus’s Final Role

Tavarus was not present in the first instant when Curtis found Rob facedown on the basement floor, blood moving toward the drain beneath his face. But he became central to what followed. The day before the funeral, he went downstairs with a sponge and bucket and scrubbed Rob’s blood from the textured floor on his knees, using both hands. The action was practical, intimate, and almost ritualistic: the house had to be cleaned, but the cleaning also expressed the friends’ attempt to remain with the physical fact of Rob’s death.

On the funeral day, Tavarus joined Darlene and the others for a small backyard ceremony only a few yards from where Rob had died. Police still moved in and out of the house, charges against Curtis had not yet been filed but were imminent, and the friends continued to eat, sleep, smoke, and mourn in the contaminated space. Christopher, Tavarus’s young son, rode around the driveway on the bicycle Rob had given him years earlier. Its becoming the right size for Christopher made the object a quiet link between Rob’s generosity and the child’s continuing life.

Tavarus interpreted the aftermath through responsibility to Jackie. When others questioned whether the house should be preserved or what should be done around the crime scene, he insisted that they act according to the needs of a mother who had lost her son and wanted answers none of them possessed. He also helped stop Curtis’s attempt to recruit private mercenaries through Facebook to find and retaliate against the killers. Tavarus had become incapacitated enough to close his restaurant and take a telemarketing job, yet he still argued that violence could not solve violence. His response to Rob’s death marked a final departure from the retaliatory logic surrounding their earlier lives.

Tavarus’s role in Rob’s story is consequently defined by continuity under pressure. He is the friend who paid for food when money was scarce, the intermediary who helped open a drug network, the would-be real-estate partner who researched titles and Section 8 housing, and the survivor who cleaned the blood from the basement and protected Jackie from further disorder. His life does not resolve into either success or failure. Instead, it shows how friendship, economic necessity, criminal risk, and care for family could occupy the same cramped social space—and how, after Rob’s death, loyalty could mean refusing to reproduce the violence that had shaped them.