An award-winning journalist's dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an "invisible city" within a city, a cradle of civil rights activism in a historically white metropolis that in recent decades had struggled under the weight of gang violence and urban blight. While shootings weren't uncommon, the identity of the shooter came as a shock to Denver's mayor and members of the city's donor class who had supported him. His name was Terrance Roberts, and he was a third-generation resident of the Holly, a former member of the Bloods, and the community's most revered--and controversial--anti-gang activist.
In The Holly, the award-winning journalist and Denver resident Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events leading up to the fateful confrontation that left a local gang member paralyzed and sparked a two-year legal battle in which Roberts tried to clear his name by proving that he acted in self-defense. Much more than the story of a shooting, The Holly is a sociopolitical saga that explores the porous boundaries between a city's elites and its most disadvantaged citizens, as well as the fraught interactions of police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex-gang members trying--or not--to put their pasts behind them.
Above all, Rubinstein offers a nuanced and humane portrait of a man whose life is emblematic of a city, and a country, that at times supported him and at other times pinned him down. Full of urgent lessons at a time when American cities are under threat like never before, The Holly is an unforgettable, deeply affecting story about the triumphs and failures of an effort to transform a neighborhood.
