Such antics could be considered typical of many adolescents trying to impress one another with macho cool. However, a 2012 report by the Sentencing Project which surveyed the lives of more than 1500 juvenile lifers found that frequent exposure to violence both at home and in the community, problems in school, familial incarceration, and relationships with delinquent peers were common in their formative years.1
From an early age, Karter went along with Gator’s schemes: “He was content to take the blame; I was content to let him,” he later wrote. Studies show that antisocial boys are often drawn to those who are aggressive and can negotiate challenging situations or provide protection;2 becoming friends with Gator may have made Karter feel more visible and accepted.3 Psychologists at his trial would later posit that Karter’s “absent” and “idealized” father might have led to his being influenced by Gator.4 Without a father present, children are more likely to follow the lead of what law professor Solangel Maldanado calls “their anti-social peers.”5
Gator had always been more outlandish than Karter. With sunken eyes and a shaved head, he courted the image of the tough guy. Some claimed he delighted in the skinhead look and called him “racist”;6 Karter thought his friend mainly enjoyed having a reputation, whether positive or negative. Gator hated his given name, “Jeremy,” and took his nickname from his skateboarding hero, Mark Rogowski, who reinvented himself through skating as Mark (“Gator”) Anthony. (Forget that Rogowski had raped and murdered a woman or that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder upon entering prison—to boys like Gator, he was a rock star.7)
Gator was the kind of student who infuriated most teachers, as he loved to buck authority. Some of his fellow students believed he idolized the mass murderer Charles Manson.8 School administrators said he was a bad influence on his friends.9 Karter wrote in 2008 that Gator once joked to the school psychiatrist about hearing voices, a prank that resulted in a not-so-funny stay at Pembroke Hospital, the local psychiatric facility. Although he had once been a straight-A student, by high school, Gator refused to obey fundamental school rules, such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. When Gator said that he was a Nazi who didn’t recognize the US flag, his instructor, a war veteran, wanted him to be suspended. After a string of similar antics, Gator was asked to withdraw from the Voke in late 1992, before being officially expelled.
In January 1993, Gator, then sixteen, transferred to Dartmouth High School, where he continued to push buttons. It was there he met fifteen-year-old Nigel Thomas, a freshman, who he introduced to Karter. A friendship eventually formed among the three youths, cemented by similar backgrounds and troubled childhoods, The three boys were called the “skateboarders” by other students, and many at the school viewed them as a gang.10 After Karter’s crime, some of the more incendiary press added to this incorrect notion, calling Karter a member of “the skaters,” youths who supposedly wore low-riding pants, baggy T-shirts, and hoodies and who favored a mixture of rap and heavy metal music. “Many of them crop their hair or have their heads shaven,” wrote the Boston Globe.11 The 1991 cult film Video Days had reinforced this stereotype by portraying skaters as rebellious nonconformists.
In fact, skateboarding for Karter and his friends was a way to be unique; with skating, they could be free outside while inside their worlds were crashing around them. Karter had started skateboarding in junior high, in part because he loved the thrill and the challenge. He also felt there was not a lot to do in New Bedford but skip school, smoke cigarettes or weed, drink alcohol, and commit petty crimes (mostly breaking and entering), none of which really interested him. Also, Karter had no car, and skateboarding allowed him to explore the city. On boards as well as on bikes and on foot, he and his friends ventured everywhere: east to downtown’s “Mickey D’s,” a building arranged like the deck of a ship whose bathrooms were labeled “Gulls” and “Buoys”; to the North End; and even into neighboring Freetown, south to the beach, and west to the mall.
Like Karter and Gator, Nigel had also faced his share of minefields growing up. Before he was ten, his parents divorced, after which his mother remarried a man with two sons. When she died of cancer in 1988, Nigel’s biological father moved to Denmark, leaving Nigel in the care of his stepfather. A month or so before the murder, Nigel, who never recovered from his mother’s death, told Gator that his stepfather was physically hurting him and that he had filed an abuse complaint against him under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.12 The accusation was especially serious, considering that there were no corroborating abuse charges from his half-brothers, and that Nigel’s biological father lived abroad and had not been active in his son’s life since the divorce. Without a caretaker, Nigel might end up in foster care. Gator thought of Nigel in some ways as a younger brother, and the abuse infuriated him.
After Nigel filed the abuse and neglect complaint, the Department of Social Services became involved.13 Karter wrote in 2008 that Nigel asked Gator if he could move into his house, as long as DSS agreed. Gator’s mother, a bank teller, and his father, a grocer, willingly offered to take Nigel in; word was that the Collets planned to seek custody.14 Karter felt sorry for Nigel, whom he believed had been devastated by his home life. He wrote that Nigel “often went to school with bruises and black eyes.” One time, he saw the boy being picked on at a convenience store when a so-called friend opened a package of oatmeal cream cookies and stuck one on Nigel’s forehead. That image held fast for Karter: Nigel was a scapegoat. For Karter, Nigel’s rejection and Karter’s own self-professed inability “to tolerate injustice” were a fierce combination.
Also stored in Karter’s mind at that time was footage from The Outsiders, a 1983 film based on S. E. Hinton’s classic teenage novel from 1967. It was Karter’s favorite movie. The film, called a “librarian’s dream” when it went from being a best seller to the screen, made its way into many US junior and senior high classrooms across the country; for Karter, as for many boys of the era, the story spoke of justice.15 Karter believed with all his teenage being that Ponyboy and his brothers, whose parents die in a car crash before the film begins, are doing the right thing even while breaking the law: as members of the Greasers, they promise to defend their buddies in street fights and from abusive adults no matter the cost. They stand up to a rival gang; they struggle against jealousy and social status. Ultimately, even the law sees their well-meaning ways. About The Outsiders, Karter wrote, “I wanted to be the hero, standing up to the bad guys and saving my friends.”
So, Karter felt no qualms when, a few weeks before Easter Sunday 1993, the Collets sat down with him and Gator and told them they needed to keep watch over a fragile Nigel. Even though Nigel wasn’t one of Karter’s closest buddies, he, too, deserved protection. Just as in The Outsiders, Gator and Karter clung to the idea that loyalty was key to friendship. At sixteen, Karter needed a creed. He yearned desperately for something to believe in.
The desperation Karter was feeling in the spring of 1993 had begun some years before, as highlighted in this line from one of his letters in 2007: “My earliest memory is being abandoned by my father.” This recollection was of the first time Derek left the house for work and did not come home, a pattern that would repeat itself many times and add to Karter’s insecurities. When I asked Derek about this in 2011, he wept, thinking about how he had hurt his son. But in the early 1990s, Derek Reed was in the clutches of cocaine. “I wish I could take it all back,” Derek said, and speaking about his son: “He always got the short end of the stick.”16
It wasn’t just Karter: no one in the family had an easy time of it, even before Derek was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years in jail, His drug use had been out of control for months before his arrest, and he blew thousands of dollars on cars, jewelry, and furs—extravagances that Sharon admitted she liked in spite of herself. She and Derek fought continually, their fights usually involving kicking and screaming, often sparked either by Derek’s drug use or his affairs with other women. For her part, Sharon retaliated by having an affair with another man and abusing alcohol. There was never enough money for the household. Sharon wished she