Drew

Drew is a longtime friend of Rob Peace and one of the five members of the Burger Boyz, the group formed with Rob, Tavarus, Flowy, and Curtis during their years at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys. He belongs to the intimate circle that grew up together in East Orange, trained together, imagined collective advancement together, and remained connected after their formal paths diverged. His importance lies in the continuity of that bond: Drew appears beside Rob in youthful celebration, athletic competition, business planning, criminal danger, and the private mourning that followed Rob’s death.

Identity and Place in the Burger Boyz

Drew is identified primarily through his membership in a tightly knit male friendship group rather than through a separate biography. The Burger Boyz took their name from the Burger King around the corner from school, where they spent the time between classes and practice. Their poverty was visible in the ordinary economies of their afternoons: Rob often bought no food, sometimes surviving on ketchup packets, while the friends understood that the austerity of his home included intermittent loss of heat or electricity. Drew therefore knew Rob not as an abstract prodigy but as a friend whose intelligence, discipline, and ambition existed alongside material deprivation.

The group’s friendship was sustained by shared routines. They ate together, smoked together, attended parties together, and moved through East Orange as a recognizable crew. Drew was among the friends who walked with Rob from East Orange through South Orange to a dance at Columbia High after junior year. When the party disappointed them, the group left in search of something better, carrying the confidence and collective momentum that had become characteristic of them. Their movement between neighborhoods also exposed the social distance between the streets they knew and the wealthier environment around Columbia High.

School, Sport, and Collective Ambition

Drew played on the St. Benedict’s water polo team with Rob, Tavarus, Flowy, and Hrvoje Dundovic. Rob occupied the physically punishing hole position, while Tavarus defended and Drew played in goal. The team’s style combined athletic aggression, verbal intimidation, and pride in entering the pools of privileged schools as an inner-city Black team. Drew was thus part of an institution in which competition became a form of collective assertion: the players were expected not merely to participate but to win, talk loudly, and refuse the diminished expectations attached to their backgrounds.

The team’s achievements gave the friends a concrete basis for believing in upward mobility. They won their first tournament at Lawrenceville School, finished second at Wesleyan University, and came within two victories of the Mid-Atlantic championships. Their weeks were organized around demanding practice, film study, and group study sessions at Curtis Gamble’s house; their weekends involved long travel, motel rooms, music, drinking, smoking, and then renewed athletic concentration. Drew’s role in this pattern was not ornamental. He was part of the disciplined collective through which the friends learned to connect bodily endurance, academic preparation, and the hope of college admission.

That hope shaped the summer after graduation. Drew was bound for Johnson C. Smith, a small university in North Carolina, while Victor Peace, Tavarus, and Curtis were also preparing to attend college. Flowy’s scholarship hopes had collapsed, making the group’s imagined future uneven even before it began. During the summer of 1998, the friends nevertheless spoke as if degrees, jobs, property ownership, marriage, family care, and collective prosperity were still a shared trajectory. Drew participated in that vision of becoming businessmen, landlords, and providers who would return to their neighborhoods with enough success to support their parents and one another.

Loyalty, Risk, and the Gray Area

Years later, Drew remained involved when Rob and Tavarus developed the Peace Realty proposal. The two men researched the Section 8 housing program and property values in the Hall of Records, then worked at the Smith Street kitchen table to revise a business plan intended for St. Benedict’s alumni investors. Drew, Curtis, and Flowy were skeptical about whether the venture could succeed, but they were encouraged by the sight of Rob and Tavarus working with the exhausted concentration that had characterized their high-school study sessions. Their hope was modest but emotionally significant: they wanted at least two members of the five-man group to achieve something durable.

When legal opportunities appeared blocked and Rob proposed a large marijuana operation, Drew became the friend who asked the most direct question. Rob had described the scheme as the group’s “gray area,” a morally compromised passage toward financial independence, and had promised that the five men’s trust would protect them. Drew challenged the premise by asking why Rob could not simply get a job or return to school. The question forced Rob to articulate the frustration beneath the plan: St. Benedict’s and Yale had not translated into a stable livelihood, and he believed that he and his friends deserved more than merely keeping roofs over their heads.

Drew’s objection did not become abandonment. When Kamar’s betrayal exposed the operation to the Double II Set Bloods, Rob admitted what had happened to his friends. Drew responded pragmatically, proposing that they dispose of the drugs and accept that they had already been paid. His suggestion represented a clear preference for limiting danger rather than allowing loyalty to become a justification for escalation. Rob refused, insisting that he needed time to regain control, but Drew’s position established him as a practical voice within a group otherwise drawn into Rob’s increasingly hazardous reasoning.

Death, Mourning, and the Ethics of Friendship

Drew’s loyalty became most visible after Rob was killed at 34 Smith Street. Jackie Peace asked the Burger Boyz not to attend the public funeral, and Drew initially reacted with anger when he learned that the service would be held at St. Benedict’s. He and Flowy felt that their absence would make them appear culpable in a community that still mattered to them, and they planned to attend despite the request. Tavarus stopped them, arguing that Jackie’s wishes had to take precedence over their desire to demonstrate public loyalty.

Drew accepted that decision and joined the Burger Boyz in a private ceremony in the backyard, only yards from where Rob had died. The house still bore the consequences of the police search, Curtis had been released after three nights in custody, and charges against him were expected. The friends nevertheless remained in the house, eating, sleeping, sharing marijuana, and trying to comprehend the vacancy left by Rob’s body and voice. Their inability to reconstruct exactly how the shooting unfolded intensified the grief: they could not know whether Rob had moved against one of the intruders or whether the gunmen had arrived intending to kill him.

The friends did know one consequence that mattered to them. Curtis believed that Rob’s shooting had caused the intruders to flee before Curtis, Tavarus, Darlene, and Christopher were also killed. Drew shared the group’s understanding that Rob may have saved their lives, even though the circumstances could never be proven. Their private ceremony therefore held two emotions at once: grief for Rob and a painful recognition of the protection they believed his final actions had provided.

Drew gathered with the Burger Boyz again in the backyard during the later memorial. They struggled to unfold and light paper lanterns, joking that Rob would have been frustrated by their mechanical ineptitude. Once they devised a two-person method, the lanterns rose above the yard, the long-standing meeting place where the friends had grown from boys into young men. The ceremony connected their earliest shared routines to the finality of Rob’s absence: beneath the lanterns, liquor, marijuana, hand gestures, and birthday salutations became a collective attempt to keep him present while wondering how far each light would travel and where it would eventually fall.

Narrative Significance

Drew’s narrative function is cumulative rather than spectacular. He helps define Rob through the environments of friendship that Rob repeatedly tried to preserve: the Burger King, the water polo pool, the study table, the backyard, the business plan, and the dangerous house where the marijuana operation was stored. Because Drew appears at both the hopeful and catastrophic ends of these projects, he embodies the distance between the Burger Boyz’s 1998 certainty that time alone separated them from success and their later effort to survive the consequences of failed opportunities.

He also clarifies that the Burger Boyz were not a simple criminal unit. Their relationship combined affection, shared poverty, competitive pride, entrepreneurial aspiration, practical disagreement, and mutual protection. Drew questioned Rob’s choices without abandoning him, proposed retreat when the drug operation became dangerous, obeyed Jackie’s mourning request after Rob’s death, and participated in a separate ceremony when the public funeral was closed to them. Through Drew, the group’s loyalty appears neither purely enabling nor purely protective; it is an ethical obligation repeatedly tested by risk, grief, and the limits of what friendship can repair.