Skeet returns to prison

Skeet returns to prison after the State appeals the postconviction ruling that had temporarily freed him. The reversal transforms a hard-won moment of reunion into another institutional separation: Rob Peace’s labor as his father’s advocate has produced only a short reprieve, while Skeet’s imprisonment resumes under the same unresolved conviction that has shaped both men’s lives.

The Appeal and the Temporary Release

The possibility of Skeet’s return was present from the moment the judge granted postconviction relief. Carl Herman made clear that the State would almost certainly file a counterappeal and that Skeet would probably have to go back to prison while the appeal was decided. The judge’s fifty-day stay therefore gave the release a built-in limit. Rob understood that the period was not freedom in any lasting sense, but he still treated it as the culmination of years spent studying capital-murder law, traveling to Trenton State, and assembling the case against the failures of Skeet’s earlier defense.

Rob tried to use the stay to restore the father-son relationship in ordinary physical space. He imagined introducing Skeet to the Newark neighborhood that Skeet had once introduced to him, and the two men entered the Chapman Street house together. The reality was more difficult than the fantasy. Skeet moved into the third floor, directly above Rob, and the house immediately felt crowded. For weeks Skeet barely left, pacing, eating, reading, and questioning Rob about school, sports, friends, and girlfriends. Having spent so much of his life attending to other people’s concerns, Rob was uncomfortable being the object of his father’s concentrated attention.

The family Christmas Rob had organized briefly supplied the happiness missing from the first weeks of the homecoming. Relatives returned from Georgia, Florida, and Ohio, and the Peace family gathered in the house where so many of them had begun their lives. Rob cooked, decorated, arranged travel, invited Victor and his aunt, and gave Jackie and Skeet imitation-leather coats bought in Manhattan’s fashion district. Skeet thanked him with a nod, but no one saw him smile. The gift carried the quiet sense that he might never wear it, an omen of how little time the household had been granted.

The Return to Prison

Just after the second semester began in January, the State filed its counterappeal. Under the judge’s earlier stay, Skeet had to return to custody. Rob once again accompanied his father across a prison parking lot, this time to Essex County, where Skeet would wait for another ruling. The physical repetition mattered: a previous walk from prison had brought Skeet into the family home, while this walk carried him back toward confinement. The reversal made the first release appear not as the beginning of a new life but as a temporary opening that the legal system could close.

The return also became a private crisis for Rob. Near midnight in Orange Park, he sat with Victor, sharing a joint and crying—something Victor had not seen him do in their eight years of friendship. Rob was ordinarily rough, guarded, and quick to tell another person to endure hardship without complaint. Here, however, the legal reversal belonged to him personally. The problem was not another person’s suffering that he could organize, explain, or fight from a distance; it was the renewed imprisonment of his father after Rob had spent years trying to bring him home.

The reversal arrived against the backdrop of a case marked by procedural uncertainty. After Skeet’s arrest, the public defender’s office denied him representation because it concluded that his Pierson Street house and a pending civil claim made him insufficiently indigent. For almost a year, Skeet appeared in court without counsel while he and the public defender’s office disputed forms, appeals, access to the law library, copying equipment, stamps, and even which government office had authority to decide his status. In nine hearings over eleven months, he fought not only the murder charges but also for the right to a lawyer capable of defending him.

At trial, the prosecution relied on Georgianna Broadway’s identification of Skeet, the revolver found on him, and the ballistics evidence connecting that weapon to the bullets removed from Charlene Moore and Estella Moore. Georgianna had been critically wounded and initially identified Skeet from a photograph while unable to speak, later acknowledging that she had not seen the shooter and had instead claimed to recognize Skeet’s voice. The jury nonetheless convicted Skeet of two counts of first-degree murder, aggravated assault on Georgianna, and possession of an unregistered handgun. The later appellate struggle therefore concerned not merely a technical delay but the reliability of the process through which Skeet’s conviction had been secured.

Rob’s Legal Campaign

Rob began working on Skeet’s case as a teenager. During an internship at a Newark real-estate firm, he spent lunch hours in the Essex County Law Library studying capital-murder cases and the details of his father’s trial. After schoolwork, while classmates watched television, talked on the phone, or slept, he read dense legal volumes and filled notebooks with precedents. Beginning in 1996, he took on the task he believed the public defenders had failed to complete: proving Skeet’s innocence.

On December 2, 1997, during Rob’s senior year at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, Rob, Skeet, and Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. Their central argument was that Skeet’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial had been violated. The petition also focused on Irving Gaskins, the elderly family friend in whose apartment Skeet had been arrested. Gaskins had told police that Skeet possessed no weapon, but he died before giving a formal deposition, leaving testimony that never reached the original jury. Herman argued that the public defenders had provided inadequate representation by allowing the nearly yearlong denial of counsel and by failing to file a speedy-trial motion once representation was restored.

The State’s position was that the delay was ordinary for a capital case and had allowed the defense to prepare mitigating factors that helped Skeet avoid the death penalty. A former public defender testified for the State that Gaskins’s account would not have changed the result because it concerned what he had not seen rather than what he had seen. The competing arguments exposed the central paradox of the proceedings: the same delay Rob and Herman presented as a constitutional injury could also be described by the State as a procedural benefit that had spared Skeet’s life.

After the postconviction ruling was overturned, Rob did not abandon the case. He found a lawyer in Toms River who reviewed the history of documents Rob had organized, visited Skeet, and accepted a retainer Rob could afford after a winter of intensive drug dealing. The final appeal was submitted through a six-page brief accompanied by a much larger compilation of supporting documents. Its claim was that the postconviction relief had been overturned under an improper standard of review.

Consequences for Father and Son

By the time of this final effort, Skeet was living in the prison infirmary, weak and heavily sedated. The medical ward offered little cancer treatment but plentiful pain medication, and Rob visited as often as five times a week. The infirmary eliminated the Plexiglas barrier that had separated them during earlier visits: Rob could look directly into Skeet’s eyes, breathe the same air, and hold his father’s hand. Yet the physical closeness was shadowed by the knowledge that Skeet did not have long to live, regardless of the appeal’s outcome.

The return to prison thus repeated a pattern that had begun with the original prosecution. Skeet’s arrest followed the shootings at 7 Chestnut Street, where Charlene and Estella died and Georgianna survived with serious injuries. Police found drug paraphernalia and an empty holster in Skeet’s apartment, arrested him at Irving Gaskins’s home, and recovered a loaded Taurus Spesco .38-caliber revolver from his clothing. The later ballistics match made the weapon a central element of the State’s case. Decades afterward, Rob’s legal work continued to revolve around the same evidence, the same missing testimony, and the same question of whether procedural failures had prevented a fair defense.

For Rob, Skeet’s renewed imprisonment was not an isolated legal setback. It reactivated the emotional and practical burden that had followed him through school, work, relationships, and adulthood. The homecoming had briefly allowed father and son to occupy the same house without prison glass or telephone receivers between them. The counterappeal removed that possibility and returned Skeet to custody, leaving Rob with documents, visits, and another legal argument as the remaining forms of contact. The event’s decisive significance lies in that reversal: a release achieved through years of filial labor becomes another separation, while the unfinished case continues to organize Rob’s identity and choices.