The Shooting of Rabbit Wells

Bill Loizeaux grew up in a pleasant little town in semirural New Jersey, in idyllic, gently rolling foothills. For Loizeaux, though, the communities of Bernardsville and Basking Ridge will always be remembered as the place where, in 1973, a shockingly bright and well-liked high school classmate named Rabbit Wells was shot to death by a policeman outside a bar where Wells was trying to help break up a fight. It is a simple, forgotten incident, only one of thousands upon thousands of senseless killings before and since. Yet for Loizeaux, it remains the turning point of his life."I am haunted by the hills of my youth," Loizeaux writes, "by what was right and what was wrong in the gentle lives we led there." He puts himself in Rabbit's head and retraces decades-old footsteps, imagining an older Rabbit, an upright pillar of the community; he invents situations that Wells could have lived and acts out the roles of the participants.Interviewing the man who killed Rabbit Wells, still a Bernardsville policeman, Loizeaux hopes that the cop will share his fervent belief that a full accounting of the incident, a "setting straight," is the only way to bury Rabbit properly and move on.