The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin Page A

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 tostraighten 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’sdrugs. 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