The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin

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, andcharged 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 havegone 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