LEBANON, Conn. — Rob Sullivan still remembers the gun and the sound of his
mother’s high-pitched pleas. Two thieves had burst into his parents’ Hartford home. Demanding his father’s dope stash, one of the men placed a gun to Rob’s right temple. “Just give it to them,” his mother begged his father.
He was 6 years old.
The incident, charred in his memory, was an early trauma among many he
recalls from his childhood. He watched his father beat his mother for not having dinner ready on time or for not cleaning the house, he said. Often, she fought back. Sometimes when he got home, his parents were too drunk or high to let him in. Truancy charges landed him in juvenile detention in his early teens.
“Chaotic — there is no other way to describe my childhood,” he said. “I always
felt alone.”
Given his history, it perhaps comes as no surprise that he has spent as much of
his adult life in prison and in drug rehab as he has spent out.
[For more on this story by AUDRA D. S. BURCH, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...rison-addiction.html]
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