The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (8 page)

But when Rob asked her forgiveness for “saying all those hurtful things to you when I was mad,” Candace refused to accept his apology. Rob, she told a caseworker, had clearly been “coached” by his therapist. What’s more, she added, she would “never feel
safe with Robert in the house.” She threatened to divorce Ronald if he ever brought his son home.

Rob was furious. The state had spent two years coaxing and pressuring and drugging him to get him to apologize—and when he finally did, it got him nowhere. “My stepmother is evil—she has no heart,” Rob told his roommate at Cooper Village, another skinny, lost kid named Dallas. As the days passed in quiet isolation, the two boys clung to each other—from the back, their long hair made them look identical—and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed by wearing purple rubber bracelets. They called themselves the Purple Skulls. Noticing that the boys got into more trouble when they were separated, the staff made it a point to keep them together. “We were closer than brothers,” Dallas recalls. “Never apart.”

One day, when Dallas turned 17, Rob was given permission to go to a dollar store, where he got heaps of candy and all the soda bottles he could carry. That night, he invited the other patients on his hall over and threw Dallas a surprise birthday party. It touched his friend deeply. “Rob could be great when he loved you,” Dallas says.

As the months passed and other kids came and went at Cooper Village, Rob and Dallas remained, dutifully obeying the regimen of classes and therapy, scheduled in orderly blocks from wakeup at 6:30 a.m. to lights out at 10:30 p.m. The two worked the system to the point that the staff allowed them to have guitars and video games in their room, just like regular kids, and to stay up late playing chess and drawing and talking. It was during these late-night bull sessions that Rob admitted to Dallas that he missed his mother terribly. “He talked about her a lot,” Dallas recalls. “He wanted to be with her.”

R
OB HAD NO IDEA
where his mother was at that point, let alone the kind of life she was leading. By then, her marriage to
Dotson had fallen apart and she was soon in full-blast dating mode, seeing three or four guys at once, hopping from bed to bed, taking full advantage of the variety and the freedom.

In December 2004, Rob finally caught a break and was relocated to a pleasant foster home. Run by a grandmother named Marty Glass who had 10 kids of her own, and who over the years had taken in nearly two dozen more children, it was the first place where Rob felt “appreciated and understood,” he told his caseworker. Glass thought he was a “joy to have around” and a “very intelligent boy with an interesting point of view.” Rob spent much of that winter outdoors, helping a contractor build a new addition to Glass’ front porch, and though he was still no angel—he was flunking out of Fort Calhoun High School, selling pot to seventh-graders and staging half-assed stickups at gas stations—that period, he would later tell his friends, was the happiest of his life.

It was around that time that Rob, who now had access to a telephone after years in group homes, finally connected with his mother. One day, after convincing his sister to give him the number, he picked up the phone and called his stepfather.

“Do you remember someone named Robert Hawkins?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” his stepfather said. Then he handed the phone to Molly, who was over for a visit. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

“Mommy, it’s me, Robbie.”

“Oh, my God, Robert!” she gasped. “How are you? Where are you?”

Molly threw herself into his life as if the separation and abandonment had just been a big misunderstanding. A few days after he called her, she was sitting on Glass’ front porch, bouncing Rob on her knee as they talked. Glass objected, saying she shouldn’t treat the 17-year-old like a baby. “But he is my baby,” Molly shot back. “He’s my baby boy.”

Molly convinced Rob to clean up his appearance and cut his long hair, and then she went one better, buying him a used green Jeep in good condition and promising it to him if he finished high school. “I wanted to let him know that I believed in him, that he could do it,” she recalls. “To let him know that he was troubled but he wasn’t sick.”

The next time Rob went to court, wearing a shirt and tie that Molly had purchased for him, Judge O’Neal was impressed. “I think you’re doing a great job, and you are a sharp-dressed man today,” the judge told him. “I’m very pleased, and I’m proud of you.”

Despite Rob’s progress, however, the judge wasn’t able to send him home. His stepmother still refused to let him return—and Rob’s father sided with Candace, refusing to take his own son back. “He appears to have picked his wife over his son,” Judge O’Neal exploded in open court. “It’s not my responsibility to raise his kid.” But with nowhere else to put Rob, the judge was forced to keep him in Marty Glass’ foster home.

Given how well things were going with Molly, Rob asked his caseworker if he could live with his mother. But Molly also decided that she didn’t want Rob living in her house. He was using meth, and in her gut she felt he was still dangerous. “Given what his father was like, you had to be careful,” she says. “I was afraid of what Rob might do to the girls.”

For a second time in his life, Rob had been rejected by his own mother. He was so angry that he didn’t speak to her for two years.

I
N DECEMBER
2005, after Rob’s stepmother divorced his father, he was finally allowed to come home. By now he was 17, practically an adult, and the judge and his father decided that he ought to get a job. For his part, Rob wanted to work. He felt like he could contribute something, even if he didn’t have much to offer an employer. Four years cocooned in the state system had
left him with little education and no marketable talents, and he lacked even basic life skills—such as knowing how to drive a car. Still, he wasn’t stupid, and he was willing to learn.

But he soon discovered that Nebraska had become an unforgiving place for kids like him. Globalization and mechanization had winnowed away the decent jobs working in corn and soybeans, and by the time Rob went looking for work, there were 20,000 fewer farm jobs in Nebraska than there had been when he was born. The loss left an entire generation out in the cold—some 10,000 high school dropouts in the state are currently unemployed, roaming the plains with nothing to do. After looking for a while with no success, Rob gave up the job hunt. He started bumming around in a haze of marijuana smoke, got busted and was put under house arrest. Eventually, he persuaded the judge to release him from the state’s supervision. The county prosecutor argued against it, but by then the state had already spent $265,000 on Rob, and, as his caseworker put it, “I’m not sure that we’re benefiting him anymore.”

“I know you’ll do well, Robbie,” O’Neal said. On August 21st, 2006, he made Rob a free man for the first time in more than four years.

A month later, Debora Maruca opened her front door one dewy morning and found Rob curled up asleep on her lawn, homeless and broke. Maruca was the mother of one of Rob’s high school buddies, Will—another working-class kid who was struggling to find a place for himself—and the two friends had spent the night partying before Rob crashed on the grass. A few months earlier, Rob had stormed out of his dad’s house without a plan or place to stay, and ended up sleeping in a meth head’s car. Now he had nowhere else to go. So Maruca, a surgical nurse at a local hospital, took him in.

“He was like a lost puppy,” she recalls. “He would follow me around with his head down. But he was really polite, and you kind of felt sorry for him.” She helped him get menial jobs, and
charged him only $50 a month, including three meals a day, for an air mattress in a little room in her house. For nearly a year and a half, Rob slept in that room—a space so tiny that two people lying shoulder to shoulder would be a tight fit—and tried to make a go of life on his own.

He did OK for a while. He found a social circle of partyers through Will, and they sort of adopted him as their McLovin, the dorky, awkward, inappropriate kid who would always say something funny, whether he meant to be amusing or not. “This is
sooo
badass,” he liked to half-joke, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he did something stupid like roll a joint with a Post-it note. “It’s rugged.” He got himself a driver’s license: After five spastic failures, he finally calmed down enough to stop ramming curbs and treating the car like a video game. He found a job working fast food, borrowed money from his dad to buy a used white Cadillac with a V8—the first thing he ever really owned. “Rob loved that car,” a friend recalls. “He used to say that when he made it big time he was going to have it dipped in gold.”

And he also got a girlfriend: a 16-year-old blond stoner chick named Kaci, who was attracted to Rob’s intense oddball demeanor. “He was sexy,” she recalls, “sexy and dorky.” Pretty soon they were inseparable, and if they weren’t getting stoned together, or watching TV, they were swooning over each other on the phone. She’d lie in bed while on the other end of the line he played Halo 3 on the Xbox, and they’d go for hours like that, with Rob whispering about his shitty childhood and his fickle mother as he mowed down virtual enemies on the screen. “We were totally co-dependent,” Kaci recalls, “Sometimes we wouldn’t even talk, we’d just stay on the phone to hear each other breathing. Man, I really loved Rob.” She pauses, then adds, “He cried all the time. It was really sad because he had, like, no family. He was the saddest about his mother.”

Still, in his stoner ways, Rob seemed on the surface to be no different from a million other slacker teens, and he might have
gone on like that indefinitely. But after a year of bumming around, he started wearing out his welcome at the Marucas. He was “getting cocky,” as Debora puts it, blowing his raises on beer and pot, and not offering to pitch in more money for rent. “We were feeling like maybe he was just conning us,” says Will, “like he could do better if he wanted to.”

Everything Rob tried to do to make money failed miserably. Whenever he looked for jobs online, all he could find were minimum-wage gigs—nothing with a future. He enlisted in the Army, announcing to his friends one night that he was going to make it to general, but the recruiter rejected him on account of his record and mental-health issues. Spiraling down into depression and drinking, he tried drug dealing in earnest. He borrowed $400 worth of pot in what was supposed to be his big move, but he ended up smoking it all. “It was just so moist,” he told a friend with a laugh.

Little by little, Rob began to feel like he was living a “meaningless existence,” as he eventually wrote in a suicide note. As he became more lost and depressed, the volatile side of his personality emerged again. The threats started gradually—a 16-year-old girl who had the misfortune of offending him was told that she was going to be killed for crossing him—but pretty soon they were indiscriminate, just like they’d been when he was a kid, and Rob got a reputation among his friends as a sort of dorky hothead.

“Rob was going around talking about kicking everyone’s ass,” one friend says. “Which was kind of funny in a way, because he was such a skinny shit. But you also felt that maybe he did know how to fight, from those years at Cooper. When he got really upset, he’d say he was going to take a bunch of people out. I’d say, ‘Dude, that’s crazy,’ and he’d be like, ‘I know,’ so I always thought he was kidding.”

Even Dallas, his friend from the group home who had managed to get a job at Target and a fiancee, couldn’t convince Rob to
straighten up. “There was a side of Rob that didn’t want to go the quiet route,” Dallas recalls. “He was getting pretty heavy into his drugs. He wanted to deal like crazy for a few years and then retire.” But when Rob tried a second stab at dealing, plunking all his cash into a cocaine buy, he ended up getting robbed, losing every gram and every dollar he had invested. “He came over to my house and was really upset,” says Dallas. “He cried a lot. He owed some pretty serious people money, and he wanted to kill himself.”

After a year of working and living on his own, Rob was broke. All that he really had to his name was the old Cadillac. He sunk again into his childhood depression—but this time there were no responsible adults in his life, no doctors and no parents, to help him. When he told his stoner friends he was feeling suicidal, they thought he was being Rob, talking shit, just blowing off steam. The only person who managed to keep him afloat emotionally was Kaci. She would talk him down and make him feel better about himself.

It was in this tenuous position that he reached out one last time to his mother. Last September, just as he had two years earlier, he picked up the phone and called her out of the blue.

Molly was thrilled. She plunged herself back into Rob’s world and tried to help him—not realizing that in the end, all her good intentions would backfire, inadvertently magnifying his despair. “I just cried,” she says of the reunion. “I really believed things were going to be better.”

T
HINGS DIDN’T GET OFF
to the best start. Right off the bat, Rob asked his mother if she would buy some magic mushrooms that he couldn’t unload. “Aren’t those the ones that make you sick?” she asked him. He said they could do that. “Well, I don’t think your mother is going to be buying any of those from you,” she said.

But that didn’t mean Molly was adverse to sharing her son’s
drugs. When Rob came over to her small apartment on Thanksgiving, they smoked a few bowls together. “Rob always said he wanted the kind of mom he could get high with,” Molly says. “Well, OK. If you got it, pass it around.”

Molly was supported by a variety of men: Her ex-husband covered her rent, and an elderly friend paid her to keep him company. To help set Rob on a better financial path, Molly insisted that he get rid of his gas-guzzling Cadillac and take the Jeep she’d bought for him instead. He offloaded the car to Dallas for $325, taking a $900 loss. Molly even bought a new stereo for the Jeep and had it installed for him.

But then his luck ran out. A few days after he put the Jeep in his name, he got busted drinking beer in it one night with his friends. Given his prior record, he was sure the judge would throw the book at him and send him to jail. Molly assured him that he could get the hearing delayed until after the holidays, but he took little comfort in her advice, telling his friends that he secretly feared she was planning to take the Jeep away. “He thought she was going to punish him,” Dallas recalls.