Who Killed 24-7 Spyz Frontman Peter Forrest?

I
t was the kind of tragedy that happens all too often in a city of more than 8 million: a body found, beaten and bloodied, in the back of an ambulette in a far-flung corner of the Bronx. Skeletal branches created a cathedral over the lonely vehicle where the 64-year-old man had breathed his last, the winter-gray river placid in the background behind a ramble of fences. “It’s a nice place to do bad things,” an unidentified neighbor told the press.

When a reporter called Chiedza Makonnen, a designer in Ghana, to tell her that her ex-boyfriend, Peter Forrest, had been killed, the journalist was shocked when Makonnen replied that he wasn’t just an ambulette driver. “She happened across my name because it kept coming up in searches involving him, because we lived together,” Makonnen says. “But when I told her he was the lead singer for 24-7 Spyz, she’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I know that band.’” 

This dynamic frontman, who’s been hailed as a key figure in Black rock history, didn’t die of opiates while touring on a broken hip, or in a mansion surrounded by friends — instead, Peter Forrest was blotted from this world senselessly. Who would kill this gentle, if admittedly arrogant, artistic whirlwind? Why was he driving an ambulette instead of touring the world? And, finally, why do we forget about musicians we once loved until they’re dead?

‘Yep, Dad. It Is the End’

While working his gig at a private ambulette company at 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2025, Forrest found the door to the vehicle damaged, as though someone had broken in, according to court documents. He called his supervisor, but by the time his boss got back to him, there was no one to pick up the call. His supervisor tracked the ambulette via GPS to that remote location — about three miles away from where Forrest first radioed — and found him dead around 11 a.m. Cops and the prosecution determined that he was likely beaten to death with a fire extinguisher after interrupting someone robbing his vehicle.

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“That Tuesday, a Detective Doyle called me and asked me, ‘Did I know Peter Forrest?’” says Ray Anderson, a dapper man with a silver beard and slick style who was a longtime friend and collaborator. Forrest had listed him as a reference on his job application. When Anderson heard that his friend was assaulted, the musician was stunned. “He was always so full of life. He’s one of the liveliest people you would have ever known,” he says. “And it really hurt me to my heart. Even now, I’m still trying to get over it.”

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Forrest’s daughter Valencia Claiborne woke up on Jan. 16 to a stream of missed calls; they all had New York area codes, but none belonged to her father. She got through to a family member, who broke the news. “I would never in a million years have thought my dad would have passed like this. It’s still surreal. Someone took his life,” she says. “He didn’t get to grow old.”

Claiborne recalls that her dad had a postcard in his Bronx apartment with the words “the end” written on a black background. She doesn’t know what appealed to him about it, even now. Maybe the typeface, maybe the sentiment. “When I was cleaning out his apartment, I saw another postcard with ‘the end’ on there. I was like, ‘Yep, Dad. It is the end. Your memory is still here, but your presence is no longer here,’” she adds.

There was no denying that Forrest had just that — presence, both onstage and off. He commanded rooms and stages in the Eighties, and he went on to mix and mingle with the likes of Nirvana, Alice Cooper, and Jane’s Addiction before flaming out in the early Nineties. And, until the day he died, Forrest always tried to rekindle that fire.

‘He Was Beautifully Obnoxious’

Peter Forrest was born on Dec. 6, 1959, in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, an idyllic planned community that didn’tallow Blacks until around the time of his birth. It’s now predominantly populated by Blacks and Latinos. The youngest of 10, he was the son of Percy Forrest, a pitcher in the Negro Leagues who died in 1994. The younger Forrest was cagey with pals about a lot of the details of his childhood — and his only remaining brother did not respond to requests for an interview for this story — but everyone agrees that music was his lifeblood. “He had a lot of siblings, but his life was very, I would say, compartmentalized — like, if you knew him as a musician, you knew him as a musician,” Anderson says.

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Anderson and Forrest met in 1977, four years after DJ Kool Herc commandeered the turntables at a back-to-school party in Morris Heights and helped invent hip-hop in the process. Anderson and Forrest weren’t really into the B-boy thing, but they both played in neighborhood bands and eventually joined forces. “The projects that we lived in, they had these terraces, and we would rehearse out there,” Anderson says. “The neighbors didn’t mind. So every day, we would sit up and play. They just saw us as kids doing something positive. He and I clicked, and before you know it, we were like Frick and Frack. Everywhere you saw him, you saw me.”

As a teen, Forrest joined the Army, an experience that would change both his music and his life. He met Valencia’s mom at a nightclub when he was stationed in Georgia at what was then called Fort Benning, and was introduced to a whole new R&B scene in the process. When he got back to New York, he hit up Anderson and formed a new R&B/funk band called the Knights; they gigged around smaller venues like Celebrity Club and Smalls Paradise. “He had this vision of how he wanted his band to perform. We had our suits; we had our hair pressed. We were sharp; we were clean,” Anderson says.

“One thing that Peter always had, he always had a vision, and he always had a gimmick,” he adds. “His theme was always: shock and awe. He always wanted to make their jaws drop. With that band, we always knocked them off their feet.”

Pre-Army, in 1981, Forrest briefly crossed paths with Jimi Hazel — a funky, jovial guitarist with a teddy-bear vibe — when a brass player had left Hazel’s band for Forrest’s. Four years later, they bumped into each other in the Village — Hazel kitted out in paisley, pearls, and a pompadour, and Forrest trussed up like a punk-rock Theo Huxtable in penny loafers, chinos, and frosted tips.

“We saw each other and ran to the middle of the street,” Hazel says. “Everybody said we’re like oil and water. And it was like the running joke. And when we finally got together and sat down and played each other some material, it was a chocolate and the peanut butter kind of thing, and that was the beginning of what wound up being 24-7 Spyz.”

The first iteration of Spyz formed in 1986, with Hazel on guitar, Rick Skatore on bass, Kindu Phibes on drums, and Forrest on vocals. Hazel’s name was already a pseudonym — adopted from his “two fathers” Eddie Hazel and Jimi Hendrix — so Forrest adopted his first alter ego, P-Fluid. “Fluid” because no one could touch him, according to Hazel, although Makonnen says it was because he was always hydrated. (With water, that is. Forrest didn’t drink or do drugs.) “The one thing about Peter early on that was well understood was his ego was larger than his talent,” Hazel says. “He was obnoxious, beautifully obnoxious. Some people loved him, some people hated him. But he was a good dude, no matter how you sliced it. He was a motherfucker. He just was a good one, though.”

Bored by what music was on offer at the time —  “the Eighties had become all about drum machines and synthesizers and coke music,” says Hazel — the guys mixed and mingled their favorite genres into a kind of sonic fusion. Some hardcore thrash here, some R&B there, a smattering of rap over there. Before hitting the clubs, they spent a year rehearsing in their apartments on those trusty terraces. “We looked upon us being in these long-term rehearsals as sharpening our axes for battle,” Hazel says. Their first show was an open mic at Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village, a now-shuttered club whose purple neon sign once read, “Through these portals walk the famous.” The band then went on to play its way through the rest of the Village, cranking out cartoon theme song medleys between the sets as mostly white kids thrashed in the crowd.

Hardcore band Murphy’s Law often put Spyz on their bill at clubs like CBGB and NYU’s Loeb Student Center. “People loved him. Peter had an energy onstage,” says Murphy’s Law frontman Jimmy Drescher. “His aura that he carried, he was just a great entertainer. He was acrobatic and nuts — almost like the leader of a circus.

“And he just had this energy. I feel bad for the other guys — for Jimi and the other guys in the band — [because] all attention was on him. It was hard not to focus on him; I don’t think he’d let you focus on anybody else.” 

That attention-grabbing quality would go on to become Forrest’s downfall, but, at the time, Spyz was a phenomenon. “We did have the reputation as being, like, the band you have to go see,” Hazel says. “There were no cellphones, there was no social media, so if you weren’t there, you missed something, and you need to make sure you see this when it happens again.” One local paper captured their performance aptly back in 1989: “They were showmen. And what a show it was. [Fluid] repeatedly dove into the arms of his screaming and head-banging fans, dropped his pants, and put the microphone in places a family newspaper can’t report.”

Still, there were early roadblocks to their success — mostly, racism and the misguided idea that a label could only sign one Black rock band at a time. “The music industry towards Black rock, we always used to refer to it kind of a Highlander syndrome: There can only be one,” says Earl Douglas Jr., executive director of the Black Rock Coalition. That group was formed in 1985 by Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, artist rep Konda Mason, and musician and late Village Voice and Rolling Stone writer Greg Tate, all of whom wanted a way to fight racism in the genre. “Still, [Spyz] could flip genres very quickly,” Douglas says. “One minute, they’re the hardest band you heard. One minute they can do a straight-up funk cover. So they were very aware of that history, where the music came from, very aware of where the music was going.”

Still, when Living Colour released their Top 10 debut, Vivid, in 1988, it felt like Spyz were facing off against Duncan MacLeod and his katana. No one would listen to their demo, Hazel says. After all, there could be only one. Labels didn’t seem to get that just because both bands were Black and eclectic, they weren’t the same act. Finally, though, the Spyz caught the ear of hardcore label In-Effect Records, brought on hotshot drummer Anthony Johnson, and dropped their 1989 debut, Harder Than You, a multi-genre pile-up that touched on politics and Forrest’s military service (see the reggae-tinged banger “Ballots Not Bullets”), kicked off the mosh pit (“Spill My Guts”), and gave a fresh makeover to Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.” With the opening track, the thrasher “Grandma Dynamite,” they stated their intention: to get out of the Bronx — or at least the crime wave that was peaking there in the Eighties.

“When I was a little boy growing up/In the South, South Bronx is where I played/And there were bullets flying everyday/And if I didn’t duck, uh, I might’ve got caught,” Forrest spat. “Well, my grandmother said/Daddy’s at work/Mommy’s there too/And if you don’t get your butt over to music class/You’ll be through.” It’s an eerie sentiment given what would happen decades later, but, at the time, the band had its golden ticket in hand; the Spyz went on their first tour in 1989. “The neighborhood watched us leave,” Hazel says. “We took an RV and a trailer that pulled up in front of our building. People came outside to wish us well and see us off, and then they watched us come back three months later in a tour bus. It was a beautiful, surreal thing to come out of our neighborhood and go around the world and then come back.”

The video for “Jungle Boogie” — in which the guys thrashed in a tropical setting with a bunch of scantily-clad video vixens — managed to make it to MTV’s 120 Minutes, Headbangers’ Ball, and Yo! MTV Raps. But the cracks were starting to show. “When Peter got home from tour, he kind of realized he was alone, almost like he had no friends, so to speak,” Hazel says, claiming that Forrest called his bandmates incessantly and then blew up at them when they didn’t always answer. “Whatever had scarred him as a child had kind of resurfaced with regards to getting close to us and us not being there when he wanted us to be there. He internalized that and turned it into a competition.”

That competition spread, Hazel said, to the band’s second album, 1990’s Gumbo Millennium. Forrest told everyone to write their own songs — and then they’d pick the best. The reviews were a bit uneven at the time, though The New Yorker would go on to call it “a definitive document of the [Black rock] movement.” To hear Hazel tell it, Forrest was somewhat resentful of the album’s success — and the new direction the band seemed to be going in. “The songs that I wrote wound up being the linchpin of the record, and that caused a rift with Peter,” Hazel says. 

Friction emerged between Forrest and his bandmates. “Dude, you don’t do that within your own unit,” Hazel says of Forrest’s behavior. “Everything we wanted, everything we asked for, everything we’ve been working for, it’s here. Why would you want to cause a problem within this beautiful thing?”

That discord simmered as the Spyz toured with the likes of Primus and Alice Cooper. Around then, Nirvana opened for the Spyz in a shed in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas while the PA overloaded and Chad Channing — Dave Grohl’s predecessor — watched his drums literally rattle apart. By the time the Spyz opened for Jane’s Addiction in Virginia in November 1990, the dream was over. “Peter announces that he’s quitting the band onstage,” Hazel says. “I got in the car with my lady and went back to New York and found a new singer.”

‘Vampires Don’t Wear Sneakers’

Chiedza Makonnen, Forrest’s one-time girlfriend, has a different take on what happened between P-Fluid and the Spyz. “He wanted to stick more to the political stuff, like ‘Ballots Not Bullets’ — and say something with the music,” she says. “I think, at one point, Peter felt like it was him against Jimi and Rick. I think that’s what led him to just say, ‘I’m out,’ in a very harsh way.”

What really hurt, she says, is how quickly his bandmates replaced him; they hired singer Jeff Brodnax not long after the fallout, signed to an Atlantic Records subsidiary, and released an EP cheekily titled This Is… 24-7 Spyz in 1991. “I think that just deepened his unhappiness with the way that things were going,” Makonnen says. “Peter felt that he worked really hard to get to where he was, and that’s exactly where he wanted to be. He didn’t want to be anywhere else except onstage, and so I think it really hurt him when he left the band and then they went on without him. He worked really hard to stay true to himself as a musician. And it cost him.”

Hazel has a somewhat less romantic view of the split, claiming that Spyz are bigger than their former frontman, and has endured despite his departure 35 years ago. (The Soundtrack to the Innermost Galaxy was their most recent release, in 2019.) Not long after Forrest split, Hazel told the press, “Peter was a character, but he lost sight of what we’re about. Jeff’s more about the band than himself.… It’s nice to have a singer that knows what he’s doing.” After that first major-label EP, Spyz continued to grow; they even starred in a Budweiser commercial in 1992 (ripping onstage while fans participated in a polar plunge), an opportunity that Hazel still recalls today as a highlight. 

Meanwhile, back in the city, Forrest didn’t take long to lick his proverbial wounds. A workhorse, he threw himself into odd jobs and music. He was in the process of revamping his new R&B rock project, the Fluid Foundation, when he met guitarist Thomas Martin at a job interview at the Hard Rock Cafe in 1993. Martin, a metal kid with long, flowing hair, was already a fan of the Spyz, so he was a little stunned when Forrest gave him his card (mysteriously, it just read “wholesaler”; Martin didn’t know why) and asked him to join the band. “I slipped out of my chair,” Martin says. Today he’s bald but regal, his twisted gray chin beard a nod to his metal roots.

Together, the two built out the Fluid Foundation, performing at clubs like CBGB and the Knitting Factory and recording a demo, but Forrest wasn’t ready to let go of Spyz — he was envious of the fame and money, Hazel claims. The band split with its big-name label, and Forrest and drummer Anthony Johnson approached Hazel with a tall tale about a major label that would pay big for the original lineup to get back together. Hazel wasn’t eager to get back in bed with the majors (he was not impressed the first time around and wanted to keep his masters), but he agreed to give it a go. Forrest yoinked a few songs from the demo he and Martin had been working on, and brought them to the band: the rocker “Fire & Water” (an apt metaphor for Forrest and Hazel) and the metal-tinged “Boots.” 

The reunited lineup released Temporarily Disconnected in 1994 via a European label and embarked on a brief tour. That album failed to make the same impact as its predecessors, though, and it didn’t take long for things to go sideways. “Midway through the tour, Peter starts making calls to the label and trying to tell them to sign him solo,” Hazel says. “When we finished the tour, I said, ‘This can’t happen. I can’t do this — and we shouldn’t do this.’ So I called a lawyer and drew up papers that told him his services were no longer needed, and that was how we parted company for the last time.”

Martin was waiting when Forrest got home, and although he doesn’t really remember Forrest’s side of the story, he says his bandmate “wanted to do different projects. And I think in that situation, it was all or nothing, and he and Jimi just didn’t see eye to eye on that.” He and Forrest revived the Fluid Foundation as P. Fluid. Eventually, though, that band fell apart, too, mostly because Forrest couldn’t find enough serious players to keep it going, and he spent close to 10 years without a project. In the meantime, Forrest worked — delivering aluminium siding, toiling in warehouses, wherever he could make a living. “He always was able to find a job,” Martin says. “He was a hard worker.”

When 2010 hit, so did a new spurt of creativity, and Forrest founded the gothy rock band BlkVampires. “He always had a vision, and he was always very determined to let music get him out of the life he was living — to that next level,” says old friend Ray Anderson, who played bass in that band. BlkVampires saw Forrest adopting a new moniker: Forrest Thinner. “Forrest Thinner was his real self,” says former drummer Ramsey Jones. (Jones’ brother was the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, so he knows something about musicians adopting different personas to fulfill their artistic vision.)

That project, which sounds something like Marilyn Manson gone R&B, featured a crew of top-tier musicians kitted out like the undead. Jones wore a black-and-white suit — with an assist from his mother’s sewing skills — and corpse paint was in heavy demand. “I remember when we played SOBs in Manhattan, we had explosions onstage,” Jones says. “We had smoke and lights. A lot of Black people that went to that club, they looked at us like we were crazy. Their jaws dropped. It was like Kiss in the hood.”

While his bandmates pranced around the stage with black dildos bobbing from their noses and top hats jauntily cocked, Forrest would open the show in a Joker-esque getup, holding a flaming Bible. “He was always into horror,” Jones says. “That was his thing. He was like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins coming out of a coffin, scaring the whole front row of people out of the theater, like Alice Cooper being beheaded onstage, or like Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar.”

Still, Forrest’s controlling tendencies continued unabated, for better or worse. “He used to do this sort of an initiation process,” says BlkVampires bandmate Randy Blu Smith. “We were never playing the songs right until we went to his house and sat in his living room and played them. It was such an intimidating experience. Now, whenever I record, I always practice just like that, just quiet and very low-tech and real skills-focused.” 

“I noticed he had a large turnover rate of musicians in his band, because he was a taskmaster,” Jones adds. “He wanted the best out of each musician. I never had that problem with him, because he always knew I was playing to my highest level.” Still, sometimes Forrest’s demands seemed nitpicky, silly even. Martin, who also played in the band, recalls, “One show I came out, and I was wearing sneakers. I gave him a ride home, and the whole ride home, he’s giving me the third degree: ‘Why did you wear sneakers? Vampires don’t wear sneakers. Where’s your boots?’”

In the end, BlkVampires became BlkVampiresX in 2019. Forrest was alone again. He dropped two solo tracks in 2022, the sunny, tropical-sounding “La Flaca Negra” and the similarly lightweight “Bike Ride in Manhattan.” They were competent, to be sure, but a far cry from his whirling dervish days with the Spyz. Through it all, though, Forrest worked — always jobs that involved driving, Anderson says. 

When he died in early 2025, Forrest had been working for an ambulette company during the day for about a year, and he spent nights driving a shipping truck to Boston and back. In his free time, he did puppet shows on FaceTime for his granddaughter, Valencia’s child. “He made these puppets, Dr. Rag and Lamby-Lambie and a fox,” Valencia says. “He did anything he could to spark conversation.”

Still, though, all who knew Forrest knew that he missed the stage. “I think, sometimes, that if [Spyz] never broke up, this would have never happened to him,” Makonnen says today. “Being on the road and being in that world took him out of that Bronx world. It’s almost like when the circus comes to town and you want to leave and go with the circus. He was part of the circus. He needed to still be a part of that circus, and that would have protected him.”

‘What Caused Them to Collide?’

It didn’t take long for the cops to make an arrest for Forrest’s murder. After all, the alleged perp was wearing an ankle monitor. On Feb. 7, just a few weeks after Forrest was found beaten to death in his ambulette, Bronx District Attorney Clark announced that a 29-year-old borough resident named Sharief Bodden had been indicted on second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter. And Bodden had a record. Freshly released from prison in 2019 for carjacking a livery cab two years earlier, he was arrested once more in 2020 for attempted robbery and sentenced to seven more years. He was released on parole in 2024, and he was still wearing the tracking device when he was nabbed for Forrest’s death. 

Not long after his indictment, Bodden’s mother told the news, “I really don’t believe the accusations. Everybody is innocent, you know, before proven guilty. That’s not who he is.” He was looking for work, she said, and living with a girlfriend. Neither his mother nor any of Bodden’s family or friends replied to a request for comment for this story.

When photos hit the news of a sullen-looking Bodden shambling into court for the first time, Forrest’s friends and family were enraged. Who was this man? And what did he have to do with the musician? “It’s crazy to me how when my father was this guy’s age he completed four years in the military, he fathered two girls, started his own band and they traveled the world together,” his daughter Nikki Richardson wrote on Facebook. (She also didn’t reply to a request for comment.) “I could not help but contrast their lives at the same age and wonder what caused them to collide on Jan. 13th.”

We won’t find out much more about Bodden’s alleged motive until the trial starts in earnest this summer, but according to court docs and social media posts, he was also a driven man. After waiving his Miranda rights back in 2017, he told cops he was innocent of the carjacking, explaining: “I got a career going for me. I’m a boxer. I make videos.… It’s not money. You ever heard of the Bronx Fight Club? Yeah, I’m in that.… I don’t play with guns at all. The only way I play with guns is Call of Duty.”

Still, while his social media shows photos of him cuddling kittens and playing with his niece, along with a sad update about an ex’s abortion and his dreams of fatherhood, there are also photos of him flashing what looks to be speed, weed, and a gun — despite his claims to cops. There are snaps of him at those Bronx Fight Club events, too, his opponent covered in blood, the caption reading, “I see ketchup!” And, in prison, he was dinged for violent conduct, creating a disturbance, and fighting in 2024; soliciting, contraband, and gang activity in 2023; and violent conduct, assault on an inmate, and having a weapon in 2022. 

At a May 16 hearing at Bronx Supreme Court, Forrest’s friends and family — including Jimi Hazel, Thomas Martin, and his last remaining brother — quietly seethed as Bodden’s lawyer tried to make a case for his client to be released with electronic monitoring. “He could work at any number of barber stores upon his release,” his lawyer claimed, adding that Bodden has been cutting hair while incarcerated at Rikers. “Sharief, in general, he enjoys art. He designs tattoos and he enjoys reading and writing.” Hazel was not moved by Bodden’s artistic prowess or sob story, though — especially when the lawyer mentioned the words “self-defense.”

“Charges of murder and manslaughter are significant,” the lawyer said, the gravity of his words somewhat undermined by his outfit: mismatched socks, pink Converse, tangerine trousers, and a red shirt. “But the seriousness of the charges doesn’t obviate Mr. Bodden’s right to engage in self-defense.… He was presented with a threat. He acted with the amount of force appropriate to that threat.”

Hazel was already steamed when he arrived at court earlier that day; he befriended a guard with whom he joked, “You’re going to earn your money today, because it’s going to take everything for me not to cross that line and kill that motherfucker.” So when the lawyer suggested Forrest had been the initial aggressor, his old bandmate was thoroughly pissed. “That’s when I finally had enough,” Hazel recalls. “I said, ‘That’s bullshit.’ And the guard said, ‘Yo, chill.’ And then he came over and stood by me for the rest of the fucking thing.” Regardless, Bodden was not granted release — due to the severity of his charges and his criminal history — and he’s facing 25 years to life in prison. Court will resume in July; his lawyer declined to comment.

Motives aside, Forrest’s friends and family are crushed by the senselessness of the crime. “I never saw Peter battle, have a fight,” Makonnen says. “He could get mad, for sure. But I never saw Peter get into a fight with anybody. He was more of just a happy-go-lucky kind of person. He was intense, he was serious and all of that, but his nature around people in general was smiley.”

“It’s tragic to see his demise sitting in a fucking ambulance waiting to go to work to make ends meet when he should have been onstage and doing what he really loved to do,” Jimmy Drescher, from Murphy’s Law, adds. “It always seems like we get attention from the industry when we’re dead.” 

‘Taking His Final Bow’

Even if the music industry had forgotten him, Forrest’s death was seismic to those who loved him. His daughter, Valencia Claiborne, recalls how he used to send trinkets and gifts twice a week to his granddaughter, whom he called ladybug; he even tattooed the bug on his arm to remind him of her. And Thomas Martin, his old bandmate, says they’d often spend hours chatting on the phone, most recently about their relationship with religion. One of Forrest’s ambulette passengers had just told him that he could talk to God at any time — “like putting lotion on every day” — so he’d started talking with the man upstairs while he did his daily route. “We’re living 100 miles apart, but we’re kind of going through the same thing spiritually — two atheists who found God,” Martin says. 

Meanwhile, his old friend Ray Anderson keeps looking at the last text he got from Forrest. “He had an emoji he would always use to close a conversation. It was a showman taking his final bow after a show,” he says. “When I saw the emoji, it really hurt. It’s like he’s taking his final bow.”

Until the end, Forrest was still thinking about the Spyz, Anderson says. Just a month before he died, the singer told his friend he wanted to call up Hazel and get the band back together. They hadn’t spoken in years, Hazel says — he last saw Forrest in 2012 sitting three rows behind him at Kenny’s Castaways, where the band first performed, watching a hardcore band shred onstage. They ignored each other. “If he would have called, I would have taken a call simply because I love somebody,” Hazel says.

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On the day of Forrest’s memorial, Claiborne gifted Hazel some band merch she’d found in her father’s apartment. “At the bottom of the box was something that literally brought tears to my eyes when I saw it,” Hazel wrote in a Facebook post that day. It was the band’s award for Best Hard Rock Band at the 1990 New York Music Awards. At the time, they decided to share the award — shuttle it between band members’ apartments on a regular basis. In true Forrest style, though, he “bogarted” the prize, Hazel says. 

When he finally got his hands on the award, Hazel’s feelings were complicated. He finally got to share in the physical glory, but it also meant that Forrest was really gone. It was like when Hazel finally acquired a guitar owned by legendary player Jef Lee Johnson after his death in 2013. “When the guitar arrived at my house, I couldn’t unbox it because … I would rather have him be alive and not have the guitar,” he wrote. “As I looked at the award, I had the same feeling about Peter.”