On September 27, 1984, seventeen-year-old Robbie Stringer, nicknamed Monster, was shot in the chest in an alley near 101st and Vermont in South Central Los Angeles by the same Rollin’ 90s Neighborhood Crips he’d been in a shoot-out with about a year earlier. Somehow, Monster made it back home alive. He cried for his mom, and when he saw her, he lifted his shirt to reveal the wound. Paramedics were called, but he was dead before they arrived.
News traveled fast. Monster was a 107th Street Hoover Crip. Members of the gang loaded into a 1984 gold Cutlass to find who had killed him. Sixteen-year-old John Singleton never called him Monster. He knew him as Robbie. And as soon as word got to him at home, Singleton left the house to find the rest of the Hoovers.
It didn’t take long. They were sitting in an alley. Waiting. Not hiding. Singleton, painfully thin with thick-lensed glasses, approached the driver. He carried the gun he’d stolen from his father. Kevin Orange, known as Big Twin, turned toward him.
“Go home, John,” he said. “Now.”
“Robbie got shot?” Singleton asked.
Big Twin hesitated, then he decided Singleton needed to know.
“Robbie’s dead.”
Though just a year apart, Singleton viewed Robbie like a big brother. He had status in the streets that made him seem older than his birth certificate claimed. Robbie built his reputation by breaking into people’s homes. Around 1982, he started selling cocaine. He was the neighborhood bully to some kids—and a protector to others. Like Singleton.
Singleton, his fists balled and teeth clenched and fighting tears, tried opening the door.
“Let me in.”
Orange shook his head. “This is not what you do,” he said. “This is what we do.” And he rode off in search of Robbie’s killers.
John Singleton never forgot that moment. What would have happened if they’d let him in? Would he have used his father’s .357 Magnum? Would he have been shot? Why wouldn’t they let him go with them? And what did it all mean?
Singleton still talked about it nearly a decade later. “Remember Robbie Stringer?” he’d ask his best friends, Michael “Fatbacc” Winters and Jimmy Ray.
Robbie’s death came on the heels of the summer of 1984. Crack had exploded. “Jam on It” by Newcleus was pumping out of every boom box. Carl Lewis and Mary Lou Retton won gold at the Summer Olympics and Lionel Richie sang “All Night Long” during the closing ceremonies of the global get-together that made the people of South Central feel uninvited in their own city.
Singleton spent that summer at the movies. Over three months he saw
Breakin’, Sixteen Candles, Firestarter, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Beat Street, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Top Secret!, The Karate Kid, Bachelor Party, and
Conan the Destroyer. He saw
The Last Starfighter three times. The
Never Ending Story. Revenge of the Nerds.
Red Dawn, Dreamscape. He saw
Purple Rain at least three times, not counting the film’s premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, which he attended as a fan and where he touched Morgan Fairchild’s hand as she approached the red carpet, a moment he endlessly bragged about.
And it was that summer his friend was murdered.
Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Golianopoulos. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
