Thanks to the internet, Jocelyn Jackson has found a community of people who remember her brother — one that she hopes will surface new leads 32 years after his murder devastated people whose lives he touched on both sides of New Haven’s town-gown divide.
Contributed photos
The late John Robinson.
For more than three decades after the unsolved murder, Jackson held onto physical traces of John Evers Robinson’s 24-year life: the tin candle he gave her for an early teenage birthday, the posthumous record of hardcore punk songs he wrote with his band.
A few months ago, Jackson found a digital trove of memories in an online Facebook group of over 100 people connected to Robinson, a musician who spent his adolescence in New Haven creating communities of friends from disparate parts of the city’s life.
Now, as Jackson and other loved ones look ahead to the 32nd anniversary of Robinson’s death, they are asking for help in their search for the missing pieces of their collective memory: answers about Robinson’s death, and accountability for the person who killed him.
Jackson knows that fear may be holding people back from sharing what they know about the case.
“I want to encourage and invite the strength that’s required to come forward to speak the justice that’s required for my brother to find this peace, and for my family to find this peace after so long,” she said. “I want them to know that the friends that John created, this whole community of people in New Haven, they’re still here and willing to actively support anyone coming forward to make this case.”
The family is working to raise a $20,000 police reward for information that leads to an arrest.
Someone murdered Robinson, whom many knew as “Rokked,” on March 12, 1990, with blows to the head in a Temple Street office he repurposed as a music studio.
Police have identified persons of interest in the case, but have not found sufficient evidence to issue charges. The case reopened in 2009 when one of those persons of interest came under a separate federal investigation, but yielded no new answers.
As this contemporary article in the now-defunct New Haven Advocate newspaper detailed, police believed that Robinson knew his murderer, as there were no signs of forced entry in his studio. Some have theorized that the murder had to do with a drug sale, or a robbery-gone-wrong; others believe a Nazi skinhead was responsible, motivated perhaps by an allegedly stolen cymbal.
For decades, Jackson’s grief remained rooted in herself and in the small group of people she knew connected to Robinson. Robinson died long before the internet became a household tool.
In recent years, she made an annual practice of searching Robinson’s name online for any new references to his life and death. In a recent search, Jackson found a comment on an article referring to the Advocate story about Robinson’s death. She reached out to the article’s writer, Howard Altman, who spoke with her back and forth for two days and created a cascade of connections to other friends and loved ones of Robinson’s from every corner of the country whom Jackson found online.
Together, Jackson and her new contacts created this website repository of articles written about the case, as well as a Facebook group of people who knew Robinson. Thirty two years after Robinson’s death, the group has brought about a stream of photographs and memories that each individual participant could not have accessed on their own.
“There is a groundswell of love in the direction of John,” Jackson said. “You still see this real strong line of heartbreak among all of us that this is a case without justice and accountability.”
Robinson grew up in Kansas with his mother, then decided at age 14 to move to New Haven with his father. He spent his subsequent years in the city attending school at Hamden Hall and devoting himself to his hardcore band, Sold On Murder, for which he wrote music, sang, and played bass.
In the last months of his life, Robinson was working on the band’s first album; the Advocate reported that he had been selling substances in order to fund the album’s production. After Robinson’s death, friends and family pooled money to produce the record posthumously.
Robinson’s death left a “void” among his friends, according to one friend, Susan, who wished to be identified by her first name only in fear of retribution. “For so many years, our larger friend group didn’t talk about it, because it only brought up so much pain for people.” Some people left the city in grief; others stayed and sought to numb the sorrow they felt while still others changed their lives dramatically as a result.
When he died at 24, Jackson was 15 years old, still living in Kansas. She knew her brother mostly through his weekend visits. She remembers his older-brother presence as they buried their pet rabbit together, and his “unflagging energy” as they painted campaign signs for their mother’s school board campaign.
After Robinson’s murder, Jackson was left to mourn the parts of her brother that she did get to know, but also the parts she would never experience firsthand from the time they lived apart.
Lyrics for Sold On Murder's album.
Jocelyn Jackson.
Since meeting others who knew Robinson, Jackson has been able to learn about her brother’s life as a young adult — and his friends have been able to impart a piece of the person they loved to her.
“Connecting with Jocelyn has just been wonderful… to come up with all of these memories to help teach her about her brother,” Susan said.
Robinson was curious and politically-minded, yet never condescending, said Xanda Fayen, a friend and, in the mid-80s, a romantic partner of Robinson who helped create the Facebook group. He wrote songs about anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, about love and mental health. He was a wordsmith; Fayen remembers learning the words “maudlin” and “obstreperous” from him.
He held a calm demeanor in chaotic situations, Susan said. She recalled a shift when they worked at Ashley’s ice cream shop together and accidentally cleaned the store with the toxic combination of bleach and ammonia.
“It didn’t ruffle him,” she recalled.
Robinson was known for his ability to flow between polarized social circles and fit right in. “He could go from the home of Yale professors to chatting with people from all walks of life on Broadway, and he was a beautiful person at any of those surroundings,” Fayen said, “but you couldn’t define him by any one of those interactions.”
His best friend, Saul Fussiner, said Robinson was a “thrill seeker”: “going to shows, misadventures, borrowing cars, everything off the rails all the time.” But “in a matter of a few moments, he could transform into this lawyerly, logical, matter of fact person.” Robinson won every argument he entered, even when everyone knew his position was wrong.
In every setting, Fussiner said, “he was never clique‑y. He was always pulling everyone into his orbit.”
Once, Robinson spent his last dime on artichoke hearts for a picnic, Fussiner recalled. “He could not eat a sandwich without cheese on it. He would get into arguments with guys at kosher delis because he wanted cheese on his pastrami. He did everything 300 percent. That’s the way he lived his life.”
And John had a knack for pinpointing the type of music that each person would enjoy. He was certain that Fayen would love Handsworth Revolution by Steel Pulse in the summer of 1986, and he had been right, she said.
Robinson’s murder still feels raw to Fayen, who has found herself discovering new aspects of Robinson’s life from the Facebook group. One new memory, posted by Ali Boyd, a classmate of Robinson at Hamden Hall, recalled Robinson as an upperclassman and class president who took time to make Boyd feel welcomed when she felt most like an outsider.
In one rough moment, Robinson brought Boyd “dough balls” of bread to eat. “After that, any time I was awkwardly standing alone, which was often, John would stand next to me,” Boyd wrote. “He was class president, a senior, seemed to be friends with EVERYONE, sang in a punk band. It’s like he wanted to give me cool kid cred so I’d feel safe.”
“A lot of those of us [in John’s circle] had struggled in various ways in our lives, and maybe not always made the best decisions and had personal challenges,” Fayen said. But most of them — including Fayen, who is a school social worker in Michigan, and Susan, who works as a teacher — grew up to build families of their own and take on public service roles. “And John never got the chance to find his way because that was taken away from him.”
Susan echoed this feeling. “So many of us that had really really rough time as a teenager and a young adult, and it’s been one of the most beautiful things to see those people grow up, and figure out who they are, and get on the path that means something to them,” she said. “But the back of my head always is wondering what John’s path would have been.”
Jackson remembers that when she turned 24, she realized, “He’s always going to be my older brother, but I will always be older than him.”