Shooting of Rabbit Wells: An American Tragedy

On a frigid winter's night in 1972, in the peaceful and prosperous bedroom community of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, William Rabbit Wells was accidentally shot and killed by a policeman named William Sorgie. Starting from that grim fact, William Loizeaux tells a story of such stirring empathy and terrible beauty that it reaches out to us across a quarter of a century and cries out its relevance. Looking for the why of Rabbit's death, Loizeaux re-creates the lives of both victim and killer and the forces that brought them together one fateful night. He has written a tender, profoundly moving memoir of a young man whose life has haunted him and whose death he could not let go.