The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [32]
“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.
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