Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  The fact that no one else was covering the trial persuaded me to stick around and see how things played out. The story revealed itself as infinitely more tangled and needlessly tragic than even the incomprehensible grotesqueness of the crime in question might have portended. As evidentiary detail accrued, the circumstances leading up to the murder and its subsequent unraveling acquired both a depressing banality and a sense of doom as foreordained as Greek tragedy—here, taking the form of an urban pathology so deep-rooted and inescapable it came to feel conspiratorial, a form of predestination.

  It went like this: One night, Kevin Howell was hanging out with Monique Foster, his ex-girlfriend. Foster was a very attractive nineteen-year-old, petite verging on alarmingly thin, still looking much closer to the age she’d been when she met Howell, which was thirteen.4 They’d dated for three years and had an infant daughter, and remained close even after their breakup. On the night in question, they were lying on Howell’s bed at his mother’s house on Grandy Street, where Howell still lived, just chatting about old times and what their daughter, Teresa, also on the bed, would be like when she got older.

  Then, unexpectedly, Howell had turned to Foster and said, “Remember on the news, when the body parts were found?” The crime had taken place a few weeks earlier. Foster remembered hearing about some arms and legs being found in a field in the neighborhood but hadn’t thought much of it.5

  Howell suddenly became serious. “I did that,” he told her.

  Foster, startled, recoiled from the bed. When she turned on the lights and saw Howell’s face, she could tell he wasn’t joking.

  He spoke in his normal (“mellow”) tone. He said a guy came to purchase crack from him and asked if he could smoke in the house. Howell told him no, go next door, and that was where he shot the man and took apart his body.6

  The story would have ended there—Foster, though scared by the confession and unable to stop thinking about it, had not gone to the police—but for a series of bizarre unrelated events. About a month after Kevin Howell’s confession, his older brother Brian was hanging out with Aaron Coleman, called “Mikey” by everyone around the neighborhood, and a few other friends, including a guy named Jermaine Overman, who happened to be the only other person who knew something about the murder.7

  Overman was a stocky but muscular twenty-six-year-old, handsome, with broad features and wispy hints of a beard and mustache. Cocky and performative, he was an old friend of Coleman and both Howell brothers. He also had a daughter with one of the Howell sisters, Sarah, whom he’d been dating for seven years. The day before the news about the body parts broke, he’d been out with Kevin and Mikey. They occasionally scrapped houses together, and that day after drinking gin and smoking weed by the river, they’d begun trawling Upper Chene in a van—Overman claimed he didn’t know who owned the van, though he’d been the one behind the wheel—until eventually, at Howell and Coleman’s direction, they pulled to a stop in front of the house on Hale Street where Morgan had been executed.

  Overman said he thought the house had been chosen at random, for a scrapping job. It was after dark, and the place looked abandoned, “which,” he said later, “people who do scrap metal, those are the houses we target.” He didn’t find it unusual when Coleman and Howell led him directly to the basement, either, since “gas pipes, lead pipes, furnace, copper wire: that’s where everything of value is.” Kevin had been laughing and joking around, acting goofy. But once they got downstairs and Overman’s eyes adjusted to the light, he noticed what looked like a rolled-up sheet, or some other kind of covering, with a human head poking out of one end. Startled, Overman got himself out of the basement as quickly as possible, or so he later claimed. Rather implausibly, he also insisted Howell and Coleman said nothing about the body, not in the basement, not afterwards, though they’d definitely seen it and hadn’t seemed surprised or upset by its presence.

  Whatever actually happened, Overman, too, never alerted the authorities. Nor did he sever his ties with Mikey and Kevin. And so a couple of months later, at someone’s apartment in the Martin Luther King Jr. housing projects, Overman found himself hanging out with Mikey, Kevin’s brother Brian, and a few other friends. A gun had appeared at some point—Overman professed not to know where it had come from—and Mikey and another friend, named Kevin Williams, started messing around with it, debating, specifically, whether or not it would be possible to kill two dogs with a single shot.

  Eventually, they left the apartment in two separate vehicles. Their buddy Nathan Smith drove everyone but Mikey, who, alone in his own car, got pulled over by a cop.

  “Oh, shit,” Overman said. “I hope he ain’t still got the gun on him.” Brian Howell was sitting in the backseat next to Overman. He was two years older than Kevin, not quite as tall, but thin and fit, and he crossed a room with a swaggering insouciance.

  Nate, glancing in his rearview mirror, said, “Mikey about to go down.”

  “No, not exactly,” Brian said. “Because I got it.”

  He meant the gun, which he pulled out of his jacket. Nate, who had just gotten out of prison a week earlier, began to panic, as did Overman, especially when Brian waved the gun in his face in a reckless manner. Overman went to snatch the piece, and somehow, in the chaos, Brian accidentally squeezed the trigger.

  “Everybody just got to freaking out,” Overman said.

  Brian had shot Kevin Williams, up front in the passenger seat.8

  It was bad. Overman leaped out of the car, gun in tow and made his way back to his girlfriend’s house, while Nate and the others raced to the hospital. Williams was already making disturbing choking sounds. “I jumped in the front seat and started slapping him, trying to keep him woke,” Brian recalled later. But this did no good: Williams died en route.

  After leaving Williams’s body at the hospital, the friends reunited with Overman and decided to go to the police to explain what had happened. Overman didn’t think it was a good idea to walk into a police precinct with a gun, so he hid it under a bucket he found in an empty field across the street from his girlfriend’s place. The only other person who knew where he’d stashed the pistol happened to be Kevin Howell, who’d been home at the time.

  When they arrived at the ninth precinct, it was 10:00 p.m., and despite their willingness to confess to a fatal shooting, the cops told them to come back in the morning. When the detectives finally got around to taking their testimony and asking to see the weapon, Overman led them to the bucket, but the gun was gone.9

  Brian Howell was facing an extended prison sentence. His mother, Mary, had been talking about the case to one of the detectives, who made it clear that the production of the accidentally fired gun would be very helpful in ascertaining the veracity of her son’s version of events. They weren’t buying the bucket story. Mary Howell knew Kevin had been around when Overman had hidden the gun, and she pressed him on where it might be. Kevin kept saying he had no clue. She didn’t believe him and was becoming convinced the gun must have had some darker history if he wouldn’t come clean to help his brother. Kevin admitted she was right, but that’s all he’d give up. His mother asked what the history had been. Kevin said he couldn’t tell her.

  Not long after this conversation, Mary Howell was talking to Monique Foster, with whom she had remained close. They were discussing the missing gun, and suddenly Foster began to relay the story of Kevin’s confession. “My kids always knew: don’t tell me nothing you don’t want to me to know, or it’s ending,” Mary Howell told me later. “That day with Monique, when she started to tell to me about Kevin, I said, ‘Monique, I advise you to stop talking now, because I’m not gonna sit on it.’”

  Foster told her anyway. After Mary Howell stopped crying—“it took me about three hours to pull myself together”—she called the police.

  * * *

  I visited Mary Howell one afternoon at her home on Grandy Street. Howell lived in a two-story wooden house with a peeling white paint job. One of the top-floor windows w
as partially boarded, and a blue tarp covered half of the A-frame roof. Only two other homes remained on the block, which looked like Greenwich, Connecticut, compared with the next block over, taken up entirely by the rubble of a three-quarters-demolished brick warehouse. One of the walls still standing read LAMINATED RECYCLING; closer to the Howells’ place, an exposed second-story bathroom appeared to have survived aerial bombardment, only the pink toilet still clinging precariously to the edge of the crumbling floor. Mary Howell said the warehouse had been like that for at least three years. An activist woman, not from the neighborhood, had come around once, trying to ascertain which demolition company had left such an unholy mess, but as Howell had told her, shaking her head at this lady’s naiveté during the retelling, It was no one. The community did it. By which she meant some entrepreneurial-minded fellows had showed up with chains and a truck one day and pulled the walls down themselves, carting away whatever they could sell.

  “Brick farmers,” Howell explained.

  Howell was fifty-one years old, with nine children, ranging in age from thirty-one to ten. Throughout the trial, she sat with four of her daughters, each one physically larger than the next, Howell relatively svelte by comparison, short, busty, her hair straightened and combed back from her forehead. She never once removed her cobalt windbreaker, even when she took the witness stand, which somehow added to the stoicism of her bearing. When I met her at home, we sat next to each other on the porch, on a couple of kitchen chairs with worn fabric seats. Part of the metal porch railing was held together with twisted pieces of wire. She didn’t invite me inside. Through her screen door, I glimpsed a stilled box fan and a hardwood floor spattered with what appeared to be white paint. It was a gorgeous spring afternoon, the neighborhood exploding with bird noises. Howell’s ten-year-old daughter, dressed like a princess on her way to a ballet lesson, had been sitting on the porch when I pulled up, and she’d literally danced inside to fetch her mother.

  At some point, I mentioned how Mayor Bing was talking about downsizing neighborhoods like this one. Mary Howell said, “I wish he would. They trying to get rid of us. But look at it. What’s there for us to stay for? I keep this lawn up.” She nodded at the empty lot next door, neatly mowed, which did not belong to her. “But if they end up building a house on it, who wants to live next door to this?” she went on, gesturing at her own place. She said her family had lived in the house for nineteen years. Her sister, one of twelve siblings, worked in real estate and had managed to secure the property for a steal, eventually selling it to Mary Howell and her husband of thirty-three years, Bernard, who used to work at Ford and now did landscaping. Howell herself had been a secretary at the board of education, and later worked as a paraprofessional.

  “Now there’s no jobs out here,” she said matter-of-factly, gazing at the empty lot next door where no one would want to live anyway, her hands steepled in her lap. “They say they’re bringing jobs back, but those jobs are way out in Battle Creek, Ypsilanti. How can you get out there?” From inside the house, I heard something beeping steadily every few seconds. It sounded like a fire alarm warning you its battery had run low.

  This is a court-reporting cliché but striking enough to note here: when Mary Howell took the witness stand to testify against one son in order to save the other, her face betrayed zero emotion. Her voice was unusually low for a woman’s—husky, too, and unspeakably weary, though the deepness gave her testimony a stony and unwavering quality. It maintained that croaking timbre up close, seeming to almost vibrate out of her chest, like an echo from an underground cave. I thought of that Our Gang character with the impossibly deep voice for a child.

  Howell approached me during a lull in the courtroom action. I was sitting in the lobby and she walked over and asked when my book was coming out, so she could tell her friends to pick it up.10 We chatted some. She still had on that blue jacket, but she spoke in a near-whisper. “That house was a drug house,” she said. “My son wasn’t involved in that. He’s had mental health issues since he was one year old.” I said it must have been difficult to testify. She blinked at me impassively and said, “Well, when I heard he might have done it, it wasn’t hard. It was so horrible. I felt for the victims. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

  On her porch, Howell elaborated. She said Kevin hadn’t started going to jail until he was eighteen, when he did two years on a drug charge. “Following in the stupid footsteps of his older brother,” she muttered, staring straight ahead. He’d been in and out of mental institutions for his entire life. When he was a little boy, he’d started a fire in Howell’s closet once. Another time, Howell turned her back for an instant while making cornbread and Kevin took the opportunity to stick his head in the oven. She said Kevin had been diagnosed as mildly retarded and schizophrenic.

  Looking back, Howell admitted she’d “felt the vibes” on the day of the murder. She knew something was amiss, enough to ask Kevin, once the body parts had been discovered, if he knew anything about what’d happened. “Of course he said no,” Howell said. I asked if Kevin had been upset with her for calling the police. “He know,” she said. “He know he didn’t have no reason to kill the man. He didn’t even know him. He still won’t come forward and tell where the man’s head is. I said, ‘If you get life, will you tell where the head is?’ He tells me no, he don’t know where the head is. He said Aaron Coleman was the last one with the head. But he did something so brutal to that man, I had to think, who would be next? Me? One of his sisters?” She sighed. “The way I feel, Kevin took a life. But he still have one. He just on the inside. His family could visit. His family could write. That man he killed, his family can’t. If I’d ignored it, I’d be just as guilty as Kevin.”

  Something about Howell’s squat, mother-hen build reminded me of my paternal grandmother. That, and her Coke-bottle glasses—you almost never saw lenses so outrageously thick anymore, magnifying the wearer’s eyes in a way that hinted at some all-seeing oracular power. In the little village where my father’s family came from, so much surname overlap took place that families also retained nicknames. My grandmother’s family nickname had been Rano, local dialect for “frog”—ranocchio in proper Italian—apparently on account of the family’s propensity for bulging, froggy eyes, so, in my grandmother’s case, it wasn’t just the glasses.

  “There’s drugs and crime in every neighborhood,” Howell went on. “That house right there?” She nodded at the lone house on the other side of Grandy, a tidy ranch with white siding. She’d lowered her voice, and I thought she was going to tell me the place was a drug spot. Instead, she said, “All the kids graduated and went to college. You can’t blame the neighborhood. It’s up to each individual to achieve.” I asked about her other children, and immediately regretted it. She fell quiet. Finally, she said, “Most of my kids are under mental health—disability. My second oldest daughter has a job. She’s a housekeeper.” Howell paused again, then said her youngest, the princess ballerina, talked about getting a teacher’s certificate, though she didn’t really like the idea of going to college. “She’s still young,” I said. Howell just hoped the girl would finish high school. “None of my kids really did nothing with their life,” she said.

  I didn’t think of my paternal grandmother very often. She’d been dead for years, and as a kid I hadn’t known her very well. We used to take family trips to Italy every couple of summers, to visit. We’d stay for a month, living in the upstairs apartment at my grandmother’s house, which she would otherwise rent out to tourists. You had to yank a chain hanging from the ceiling to flush the toilet. It was an old stone building, and the kitchen had the funky smell of a cellar where someone had been curing meat. Every visit, a few days before we were supposed to leave, my grandmother would begin to cry. You could set your watch by it. My father’s sister, my zia Rafaela, would slap her mother gently on the shoulder and tell her, Ma dai, Bianca! Those glasses, at such moments, would enlarge her sopping irises until you could imagine each of them filling
its own drive-in movie screen. I couldn’t get over how much Mary Howell reminded me of Nonna Bianca, and I could easily picture her own eyes redly swelling behind her lenses, just like my grandmother’s, though the whole time we spent together there was never the slightest hint of tears.

  * * *

  On the sidewalk outside the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, a sign listed the various items forbidden in the building, including Alcoholic Beverages, Ammunition, Aerosol, Bingo Markers, Boxcutters, Bullets (Anything Resembling), Curling Irons, Combs (Metal or Rattail), Drug Paraphernalia, Flatware, Noisemakers of Any Kind, and Whistles. When I arrived, there was a long, morning-rush-hour queue to get inside (all court spectators were required to pass through a metal detector) and I felt a sleepy camaraderie among the line waiters, most united in some form of direct or by-proxy opposition to the Man.

  The courtroom was on the fourth floor. I found the windowless, climate-controlled space, with its minimalist, midcentury modern decor—blond wood benches, darker ribbed paneling on the walls, a recessed octagonal ceiling—cozily hermetic. Silver-haired Judge Hathaway also seemed of another era, looking as if he should be interviewing Dean Martin on a late-night talk show while chain-smoking on air; even his flat, slightly nasal accent had a faintly Carsonic purr.

  Kevin Howell’s mother and sisters lined the bench in front of me. As far as I could determine, Aaron Coleman had no family members in the courtroom the entire week. David Morgan Jr.’s sister and brothers and two grown sons occupied a bench running along the courtroom’s far wall. One brother, a postal worker, stole into the room a couple of hours late every day, still wearing his blue postman’s uniform and cap. Another brother, apparently a motorcycle enthusiast, had a shaved head and a long beard and wore a leather Harley-Davidson jacket, and whenever he walked stiffly by, you could hear the swishing of whatever sort of protective leather chaps he had on underneath his jeans.