Skeet

Skeet is the absent and contested center of Rob Peace’s life: a father separated from his son by imprisonment, a murder conviction Rob believes was wrongful, and a legal system that repeatedly turns hope into delay. Though Skeet appears only through prison visits, legal records, family memories, and Rob’s later testimony, his presence governs the son’s emotional life and decisions. Rob’s effort to defend him becomes both an act of filial devotion and a burden that follows him from East Orange to St. Benedict’s, Yale, and adulthood.

Identity and Imprisonment

Skeet was imprisoned in connection with the murders of Charlene Moore and Estella Moore. By the time Rob was a teenager at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, he had not seen his father as an ordinary parent since childhood. During a confrontation at the school pool, Rob shouted that he had not had a father since he was seven years old, revealing how completely Skeet’s absence had become part of his identity. Coach Ridley had never before heard Rob mention him, and Rob’s anger made clear that the imprisonment was not a closed episode in the past but a continuing emotional fact.

Rob visited Skeet once a month, more often when sports allowed, and kept those visits secret. The meetings took place across Plexiglas, reducing father and son to carefully managed half-hour exchanges while the outside world continued to change. Skeet nevertheless remained intensely interested in Rob’s daily life. When he was finally released, his questions focused almost entirely on his son’s school, sports, friends, and girlfriends, rather than on the historical information Rob had prepared to share about Newark and the wider world.

Skeet’s imprisonment also shaped the wider group around Rob. The fathers of Tavarus Hester, Flowy, Drew, and Curtis Gamble had died or disappeared from their lives, and the boys recognized father absence as a shared condition rather than an isolated family tragedy. Skeet’s absence was distinctive because he was alive and reachable, yet institutionally removed: Rob could visit him, write to him, and work for him, but could not simply bring him home.

Rob’s Campaign for His Father

As a teenager, Rob took responsibility for preparing Skeet’s first appeal. During an internship at a real-estate firm, he spent lunch breaks in the Essex County Law Library studying capital murder cases and the details of his father’s trial. After beginning his junior year, he continued the work late at night, filling notebooks with legal precedents while classmates watched television, talked on the phone, or slept. His schoolwork, athletic commitments, trail hikes, lifeguarding, leadership duties, romances, and college applications all unfolded alongside this sustained legal labor.

On December 2, 1997, midway through Rob’s senior year, Rob, Skeet, and the pro bono lawyer Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. Their central claim was that Skeet’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial had been violated. They also focused on Irving Gaskins, whose home was the place where Skeet had been arrested. Gaskins had stated that Skeet possessed no weapon, but he died before giving a formal deposition, leaving potentially important testimony outside the original trial record.

Carl Herman argued that Skeet’s public defenders had provided insufficient representation. The defense had been denied for nearly a year after the arrest, and, after representation was restored, the lawyers had not filed a speedy-trial motion. A former public defender testified for the State that a three-year interval between arrest and trial was not unusual in a capital case and that Gaskins’s statement would not have changed the outcome. The lawyer also argued that the delay had benefited Skeet by giving the defense time to assemble mitigating factors and avoid the death penalty.

The judge nevertheless sided with Skeet. The indictment charging him with murder and other offenses was dismissed because of the speedy-trial violation, although the decision was stayed for fifty days so that the State could appeal. After ten years and four months connected to the Moore sisters’ murders, Skeet came home, but the release was provisional from the beginning.

Homecoming and Reimprisonment

Rob had imagined Skeet’s release as the culmination of years of research, prison travel, and sleepless preparation. He and Carl walked with Skeet from the final prison guard station into the parking lot beneath an overcast Trenton sky. During the drive toward Newark, Rob had prepared a mental catalogue of the decade Skeet had missed: the Gulf War, Bill Clinton, the demolition of four project towers by Mayor Sharpe James, the rise of Nas, Outkast, Tupac, and the Notorious B.I.G., and the murders of the last two artists. He had even made a mix tape for the journey.

The conversation did not follow Rob’s plan. Skeet wanted to know about Rob. He turned toward his son in the back seat, their similar faces only inches apart and no longer divided by Plexiglas. Rob, who had built his life around other people’s needs, became increasingly quiet under the attention. The physical barrier had disappeared, but the emotional habits created by years of separation remained.

Skeet moved into the third floor of the Chapman Street house, directly above Rob’s room. His arrival immediately made the house feel crowded. For the weeks before Christmas, he rarely left. He paced, ate, read, and questioned Rob constantly, while seeming self-conscious about meeting neighbors who had once regarded him as part of their extended family. When Rob urged him to walk through the neighborhood, Skeet refused because it was too cold. The homecoming Rob had imagined as a restoration of family life instead exposed how much imprisonment had altered Skeet’s relation to the outside world.

Rob organized a large family Christmas, bringing relatives back from Georgia, Florida, and Ohio and inviting Victor and his aunt. He cooked, decorated the house, and gave Jackie Peace and Skeet imitation-leather coats bought in Manhattan’s fashion district. Skeet accepted his coat with a nod, but no one saw him smile, and the narrative suggests that he understood he might never wear it. In January, the State filed its counterappeal. Under the judge’s stay, Skeet returned to prison, and Rob again accompanied him across a prison parking lot, this time to Essex County, to await another ruling.

The State ultimately prevailed. During Rob’s freshman year at Yale, the postconviction ruling was overturned, and Skeet was transferred to Trenton State Prison once more. The reversal transformed Rob’s brief experience of legal success into another confirmation that freedom could be granted and withdrawn by institutional procedure. His work on behalf of his father had produced a temporary homecoming, not a durable change in their circumstances.

Skeet’s Death and Rob’s Memory of Him

Skeet’s final years were marked by illness as well as incarceration. Brain cancer caused weight loss, headaches, nausea, swelling, and overwhelming fatigue. His mental faculties flickered: on some visits he retained the charismatic intensity associated with his earlier life, while on others he seemed distant and could only mouth inaudible words. Rob sometimes sat silently beside him for the entire visit. The disease’s attack on Skeet’s mind was especially cruel because Skeet had valued intelligence and human knowledge, and Rob had made his own intellect the principal instrument of his father’s defense.

On August 16, 2006, Rob learned that Skeet’s final appeal had been denied. The ruling held that the lower court had applied the correct federal standard in rejecting the challenge. Six days later, Skeet became unconscious, and his respiratory system failed that night. He died quietly in his sleep, alone, one month short of his sixtieth birthday.

Rob handled the funeral arrangements. Few people attended the service in East Orange, although Skeet’s old friends continued to tell stories about him. At Rosedale Cemetery, less than two miles from Chapman Street, Rob stood with Jackie as the coffin was lowered. His bowed head and rigid body supported his mother while she confronted the decisions being buried with Skeet. Mother and son each dropped a lily into the grave and left as the dirt was packed in.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Skeet functions in the book as both a character and a long-running absence. His imprisonment reorganizes Rob’s family role: the son becomes researcher, advocate, interpreter, and eventually caretaker. Rob’s education is therefore never simply an escape from Newark. The legal knowledge he acquires while pursuing Skeet’s freedom becomes part of his intellectual formation, while the repeated reversals keep him bound to the neighborhood and to the institutions he distrusts.

Rob’s later account of Skeet’s case at Elihu reveals how thoroughly the father has become the central argument of the son’s life. Speaking for four hours without notes, Rob described the trial, the prison visits, the successful appeal and its reversal, and the monthly letters he continued sending to appellate judges. He presented Skeet as a great man wronged by a system designed against people like him, and he offered a detailed theory that the murder weapon had been stolen from Skeet’s apartment, used in the killings, returned, and then illegally removed by police to frame him. Whether or not Rob could prove every part of this account, his need to construct a complete defense was unmistakable.

Arthur Turpin, who had sensed Rob’s anger beneath his humor and marijuana use, recognized that Skeet’s case reached deeper than Yale’s debates about class or race. Rob could intellectualize almost every subject, but his words about Skeet came from an intensely emotional place. He still could not establish where his father had been on the morning of the murders, and that unresolved gap also obstructed his ability to understand where he himself belonged.

Skeet’s legacy is consequently double. He is the father Rob fights to restore, the prisoner whose absence helps produce Rob’s fierce competence, and the dying man whose return never becomes ordinary family life. His story demonstrates how imprisonment extends beyond prison walls: it governs visits, childhood, education, legal work, household space, public identity, and mourning. For Rob, Skeet’s freedom is never secure, his innocence is never settled, and his death does not end the case. It leaves behind the unanswered demand that Rob had spent his life trying to meet: to prove that his father had been seen, understood, and defended.