Thomas Cobb's latest novel based on 1993 Foster shooting

By Andy Smith
Journal Arts Writer Posted Oct. 25, 2015 @ 12:01 am

Frank and Charles Sherman were my cousins, Wayne G.Barber

Thomas Cobb's latest novel based on 1993 Foster shooting.
The former RIC professor, author of "Crazy Heart," based his story on the murder of three teenagers by suspended police officer Robert G. Sabetta Jr.

For Rhode Islanders with good memories, there should be something familiar about the plot of Thomas Cobb's latest novel, "Darkness the Color of Snow 

The novel, published in August, begins with a traffic stop gone bad and a young cop facing disgrace. Something within the cop snaps, and he walks into a garage where some of the young men from the traffic stop are working. He starts shooting.

If that sounds like a 1993 case in Foster, when suspended police officer Robert G. Sabetta Jr. shot and killed three teenagers — Frank Sherman, 16, his brother Charles, 17, and Jeremy Bullock, 19 — at Wilson's Garage on Route 6, that's because Cobb based his novel on the Sabetta case.

"I live in Foster, so I've been thinking about this for a long time," Cobb said. "I didn't know any of the people directly involved in the crime, but when you live in Foster, there's not much more than one degree of separation. I couldn't help but see the damage that was done."

Cobb, 68, a native of the Southwest, retired from teaching at Rhode Island College in 2010. His 1987 novel "Crazy Heart" was adapted into a film in 2009 starring Jeff Bridges, who won the Oscar for best actor for the role.

Cobb said he is in the middle of a trilogy of novels set in his native Arizona. But his literary agent urged him to try something different, and Cobb decided to write a novel loosely based on the Sabetta case.

He tried a first draft of the novel set in Foster. That didn't work.

"When I read it, something was way off. I realized I was not moving on my own, I was letting the [real] story push me," Cobb said.

Cobb said he's never written about the place where he lives, with the exception of a short story set at Triggs Memorial Golf Course in Providence for the anthology "Providence Noir." 

"When I lived in Tucson, I never wrote about Tucson," he said. "I didn't start until after I left."

So to find the setting for "Darkness the Color of Snow," he and his wife, Randy, drove north and west, and ended up in a small town in upstate New York, near the Vermont border. They spent a day or two there to soak up some atmosphere, and Cobb created the fictional town of Lydell, N.Y., for the book.

Cobb said he read a few articles online about Sabetta to refresh his memory. And Cobb stayed true to the basic outline of the Sabetta case: it opens with a traffic stop, and climaxes in a triple murder.

In between, however, Cobb crafted his own story: "I'm not a non-fiction writer. I'm a novelist," he said.

There's a key difference near the beginning of the book. In real life, Sabetta had been accused of hitting Frank Sherman in the face with a flashlight, knocking out two front teeth.

In Cobb's novel, police officer Ronald Forbert tries to arrest Matt Laferiere during a traffic stop. The two struggle and Laferiere stumbles into the road, where he is struck and killed by an oncoming car.