The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

by Jeffrey Toobin

  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.

  IN 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 mo
ther. 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.”

  THINGS 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.

  In private, feeling alone and desperate, he wrote out a suicide note. “Nothing ever seems to work for me. And I know that nobody will ever really understand. I am always in debt, and I probably always will be. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not afraid. But whatever happens I know it can’t be too bad when you die.” Then he closed by begging whoever found his body to hide his suicide from Kaci. “Just please, I don’t want Kaci or her family to know what I’ve done.”

  But instead of acting on the note, he shoved it in a bookcase in his bedroom at the Marucas, where it would not be found until two weeks after the shooting.

  Then things got even worse. A few days earlier, he had gone on a date with a co-worker at McDonald’s, where he was working the night shift. The date set in motion a chain of events that pushed Rob over the edge. When Kaci found out that he had taken the girl home, she confronted him. At first he acted guilty and distraught, but he was soon alternating between begging her forgiveness and angrily demanding that she understand his need to spread his wings. When he went to his mother for advice, saying he felt horrible for cheating on Kaci, she counseled him not to take it so seriously.

  “I don’t view it as cheating,” she told him. “You’re not really expected to be monogamous when you’re 19. You’re young—things are forgivable.”

  Emboldened by his mother’s words, Rob called Kaci and told her that he was going to keep fucking the new girl. “She’s a nasty bitch,” he bragged. “I fuck her all over the place, and she’s good to me.”

  Kaci burst into tears. “How can you be so mean to me?” she sobbed. Rob apologized. “This is a weird time in my life,” he told her. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.” He explained that he planned to kill himself.

  It was not the first time he’d said that, and Kaci was especially sensitive to the threat, since her last boyfriend had hung himself over a staircase one day after school. As it happened, this boyfriend had been the third friend of hers who’d taken his own life; suburban communities like Bellevue are the hardest-hit by teen suicides in Nebraska. But instead of confronting Rob, as she always had, she let it go. “I always used to talk him out of killing himself,” she recalls. “But this time, I just didn’t. I was so mad at him for breaking my heart.”

  That was on Tuesday afternoon, December 4th. A few hours later, as the sun was setting on the Nebraska plains and workers at Von Maur were turning on the Christmas lights at the mall, Rob drove to his mother’s for dinner.

  HE WAS LATE, as usual, and dressed like crap, but Molly was too overjoyed to see him to comment. So great was the gulf between them, and so thorough was her misunderstanding of his condition, that she couldn’t see he was depressed when he shuffled through the front door that evening. In fact, she thought he was “doing pretty well.”

  Molly was in a good mood that night. She had just finished writing her autobiography, a strangely graphic confession of her sexual adventures, and she felt like celebrating. But as the dinner wound down, the conversation turned to Rob’s breakup with Kaci. When he said he felt guilty about the whole affair, Molly replied, “Well, if you feel bad about it, maybe you shouldn’t have done it.”

  Rob said he guessed she was right and returned to his food as the talk turned to other subjects. Then, toward the end of the meal, he abruptly said that he had been fired from McDonald’s a few days before. The cash-register count was short on Rob’s shift. “The manager made me empty my pockets,” Rob complained. “He took $12 from me.”

  “He can’t do that,” Molly said. “Do you want me to go down there and get your money back?”

  “No,” Rob said. “It’s not worth it, Mom.”

  After dinner, they sat in front of the computer and found a couple of online applications for low-wage job openings, including one at a nursing home. Molly tried to encourage him. Sometimes in life you have to be poor for a very long time, she told him, but you always get by. “Look at me,” she said. “I think I’ve done pretty well for myself.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” he told her.

  Then Molly went shopping, leaving Rob alone in the house. He went upstairs to the master bedroom, went into the closet, took his stepfather’s AK-47 and put it in the Jeep. Then he went back inside and sat on the couch listening to his iPod. His favorite song was Judas Priest’s “Hell Bent for Leather”: Screams! From a streak of fire as he strikes. Molly had loaded the songs for him, because he couldn’t figure out iTunes. When she came home half an hour later, Rob was still there, lost in his own world.

  “He just got up, hugged me really tight, and left,” Molly says. “He didn’t say much of anything.”

  That evening, when he got back to the Maruca residence, Rob proudly showed the rifle to Will, saying that it was on loan from his stepfather. He invited Will to take it target-shooting the next day. The two boys often went to a homemade target range they had set up in the woods nearby, where Rob had honed his skill. But they rarely got their hands on an AK-47, and now they snapped a picture of the weapon with a cellphone and e-mailed it to a few friends. Around 11 p.m., Rob smoked a few Camels, tossing the empty butts in a bucket by his bed, and went to sleep, stone-cold sober.

  Rob may have intended to use the rifle for target practice. But in the morning, he got a rude awakening. Molly had discovered the theft, and she was pissed. She called the Marucas and left a message: “Tell Rob to call his mother right away.” When Will gave Rob the message, he recoiled. “Oh, man—she found out I took the gun,” he told Will, who admonished him for swiping it. Rob promised to return it. But rather than face his mother, he sat down and wrote another suicide note.

  “I’ve been a piece of shit my entire life,” he wrote. “It seems this is my only option. I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster, but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life. I just want to take a few pieces of shit with me.”

  Rob left the note next to his bed and drove over to see his friend Dallas. When he arrived, he slumped down on the big leather couch, flicked on the Xbox and began to play in wordless concentration. But before long, he tossed the controller on the co
uch and started talking, then crying.

  Tears ran down his face. Everything was wrong—everything. The Marucas were going to kick him out and he’d be homeless. He’d fucked up with Kaci, the one girl he could see marrying. She hated him, and maybe rightly so. He was looking at jail time—over Christmas—for drinking beer in the Jeep, and he didn’t even have the money to pay the fine, let alone a lawyer.

  When his mother found out about the gun, she was likely to take back the Jeep, and then how the hell was he going to get around? Where was he going to sleep? What were they going to do to him in prison? Through tearstained eyes, he looked up at his old friend. “I’m fucked, dude.”

  “Dude, I love you. I’m here for you.”

  “I know,” Rob said, getting up off the couch. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  He called Will and said he was sorry for everything. Will could tell by his voice that he was on edge. “You haven’t done anything yet, Rob,” Will told him. “Just chill out, OK?” Putting his hand over the phone, he called out to his mom, who was getting ready for work.

  “I think Rob’s going to kill himself,” Will said. “Can you talk to him?”

  His mother got on the phone. Whatever it is, she said, it’s no big deal.

  “I just want to thank you for all the stuff you’ve done for me,” Rob told her. “I’m sorry.”

  Rob hung up and called his mother. When Molly didn’t answer, he left a message. He sent a text message to Kaci, telling her that he loved her and was sorry for everything and that he was going to go have a “standoff.” Then he sent the exact same message to his new girlfriend.

  Rob told Dallas he was going to take off. Standing at the door, the two friends hugged. Dallas felt like Rob wasn’t really there, “like he wasn’t in his body.” After Rob left, Dallas grew worried. He switched on the TV. “I was thinking if Rob was going to do something, like get in a shootout, it would be on the news.”