The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood

On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in the northeast Denver neighborhood known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an “invisible city” within a white-metropolis city that in recent decades had struggled under the weight of gang violence and urban blight. The identity of the shooter came as a shock to everyone. His name was Terrance Roberts, and he was a third-generation resident of the Holly, a former member of the Bloods, and the community’s most revered—and controversial—anti-gang activist. Denver native Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events leading up to the fateful confrontation that left a local gang member paralyzed and sparked a two-year legal battle. Much more than the story of a shooting, this book is a sociopolitical saga that explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens, as well as the fraught interactions of police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex-gang members. 

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