A Rip in Heaven by Jeanine Cummins
After reading American Dirt I developed an ardent admiration for Cummins’ artistry which prompted me to check out her other works hence why I spent the entire Tuesday night reading her memoir, and I’ve never been more pessimistic about humanity than this book made me. Through my reading, I kept visiting Wikipedia just to make sure the facts were correct, and I couldn’t help but shed tears for the victims of that bridge on that April 4th night, 1991.
This book shook me to my core. Goosebumps ran through my skin as I turned each page, my heart thudding in disbelief at the brutality I was reading about. The violence was not fictional, not a writer’s invention, it was horrifyingly real. I remember pausing at intervals, my fingers trembling, rushing to Google and scanning through old newspaper archives, news reports, and interviews, hoping there had been some mistake, that perhaps Jeanine Cummins had exaggerated parts of the story for narrative effect. But she hadn’t. Every detail, every heartbreak, every injustice was as real as it was unbearable.
A Rip in Heaven tells the tragic story of the author’s cousins, Julie and Robin Kerry, and her brother, Tom Cummins, who were victims of a brutal attack on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. What seemed as an ordinary outing turned into a nightmare when four young men assaulted them and kicked the girls off the bridge to their deaths. Reading about that night made my chest tighten. It happened in 1991, not even near my birth year, but it feels like it happened yesterday. I had to stop more than once just to breathe. The cruelty of it all, the senselessness was something my mind struggled to process.
But what made it worse, what truly tore at my heart, was learning that one of the main culprits, Richardson, who actually kicked them from the pier, walked free, protected by juvenile laws. Sixteen years old, and somehow “too young” to face the consequences of his choices. I can’t accept that. At sixteen, a person knows the difference between right and wrong. A sixteen-year-old who can laugh and shove a girl off a bridge into a dark river knows exactly what he’s doing. A sixteen-year-old capable of rape, knows what he’s doing. To excuse that kind of deliberate evil because of age feels like a mockery of justice. It’s a freaking slap in the face of the victims and their families.
we stayed up reading together
Jeanine Cummins writes this story with both tenderness and rage, a careful balancing act that keeps you tethered to her pain. Her prose is calm, almost too calm at times, which somehow makes the horror more chilling. It’s not just a retelling of a crime but also an intimate unraveling of grief, survival, and the permanent fracture that loss leaves behind.
I finished the book just before dawn, staring at my ceiling, completely numb. The weight of injustice, the fragility of life, and the depth of cruelty in human hearts sat on me like a stone. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t shake the thought that those two girls, full of promise and light, were robbed of futures they deserved, of dreams that could have changed the world.
This isn’t an easy book to read, and it’s not supposed to be. It’s painful, haunting, and deeply personal. It’s a testimony to the resilience of a family scarred by unimaginable violence. But it’s also a reminder that real evil exists, that justice is often imperfect and that empathy, raw, gut-deep empathy, is the least we owe the victims of such cruelty.
This one broke me. But it also made me listen, to the silence of those lost voices and to the ache that still lingers even decades later.
You should read it. Such gem.