The Snake Patch

On a summer night in 1963, four pre-teen boys are talking baseball and girls in their sanctuary, a tree house in the middle of a vacant lot called the "snake patch." Their idyllic bull session turns to horror when a teen-age sexual predator rapes his girlfriend under the tree house, unaware the four boys are watching. When the girl later kills herself, the boys - one of whom is the son of the police officer assigned to investigate the case - struggle to reconcile the rape-suicide with their own burgeoning sexualities. As the boys contend with these coming-of-age experiences, their lives are overshadowed by the criminal case that is developing around them, and the power struggles among the adults who must protect them and still use their testimony to prosecute the rapist. Along the way, childhood concepts of ethics, heroism and justice are challenged and, eventually, redefined