Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  There was a large contingent from the Melena family, and even more friends and neighbors, and they went berserk, trying to crawl over the gates to get to Lawrence Todd, screaming and cursing him in at least four languages.

  “Bailiff, order in the court! Bailiffs, order in the court!”

  The judge had to threaten to clear the courtroom before the crowd settled down.

  Thank you, Miss Vicki.

  The defense attorneys waved the surrender flag, threw in the towel, and probably planned their retirement in that moment.

  “No questions, Your Honor.”

  The defense wanted her off the stand before she got them all sent to prison.

  I turned to the DA and said, “Trial over. Get out the rope.”

  Of course, there was still the formality of sending the jury in for deliberations. That took all of five minutes. They even skipped their free meal, which is rare.

  The jurors basically did a line dance into the deliberation room and right back out.

  Guilty on all charges.

  The trigger in this case was evil. It wasn’t a crime of greed or jealousy or passion or revenge. It was plain evil at work.

  The judge sentenced the guilty bastard to life in prison for murdering Sam Melena and threw in twenty to thirty years for armed robbery, up to eight years for conspiracy, and a year for third-degree assault.

  Personally, I would have recommend dragging his ass into the courthouse square, stabbing him, stomping him, shooting him in the forehead, and then hanging him.

  But that’s why I’m not a judge.

  May you rot in hell, Lawrence Todd.

  Chapter Seven:

  A Nest of Vipers

  the trigger: revenge, rage, and money

  Multiple shots fired in the apartment complex at 2100 Preuss Road on the South Side.

  A barrage of 911 calls lit up the operations center at the Colorado Springs Police Department just before one thirty a.m. on July 15, 1991.

  Our patrol officers were dispatched. They arrived to find alarmed residents shouting and weeping in doorways and outside the four drab two-story buildings.

  The low-rent complex was well known to our department as a nest of vipers, swarming with gangbangers, drug dealers, sex workers, and other bad actors. Not everyone who lived there was a criminal, but everyone who lived there had criminals for neighbors.

  Our guys had just arrived when another call came into the 911 operations center, this one from nearby St. Francis Hospital’s emergency room. They had a twenty-two-year-old woman, Sharon Coleman, with a severe gunshot wound. Her boyfriend had brought her in, saying she was shot in his car as they were leaving the parking lot at 2100 Preuss Road.

  It was going to be a long night, and an even longer investigation. This was our nineteenth homicide of the year, and the third in three days. The South Side had become a shooting gallery.

  While the ER docs were struggling to stop the young woman’s massive bleeding, our patrol officers went to the hospital, picked up the nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Ernest “Sonny” Wright III, and brought him back to the apartment complex to try to figure out what had happened.

  They learned he’d been dating Coleman for two years. She was a churchgoing young woman who worked at Hamburger Haven and Taco Bell. She had worked that night, so she couldn’t go to a party with him. After getting off, she had gone to visit his mother in the complex.

  Sonny had picked her up there after leaving the party. They were driving out of the parking lot when he saw a muzzle flash come from neighboring Adams Park. Then he heard a shot, and something hit his car.

  Sharon Coleman moaned in the seat next to him. Wright saw a rapidly growing bloodstain on her blouse, so he drove as fast as he could to St. Francis Hospital.

  As the patrol officers were interviewing Wright, dispatch called and said the ER doctors had lost their ninety-minute fight to save Sharon Coleman.

  She never knew what hit her that night.

  They say life is random. Death has it beat.

  field of fire

  The death of Sharon Coleman shifted the shooting investigation to a homicide investigation. I was the lieutenant commander in charge of major crimes, including homicide. I got the call while nestled all snug in my bed.

  I drove to the south side in my unmarked car and walked into a chaotic scene, as usual. Welcome to the world of murder and mayhem.

  Residents were crying, frantic and scared, which was understandable given that a rapid explosion of high-caliber, high-velocity gunfire had ripped through their buildings and vehicles.

  Even in this rough part of town, that level of violence was rare.

  The real mystery was how more people weren’t killed or maimed in this rampage. There weren’t many windows in these buildings, but a lot of them were shattered.

  We found bullet holes in walls and in at least three vehicles. Residents ran up to us, reporting muzzle flashes from a park across the street. Some had heard bullets whizzing by their beds.

  Several said they had seen a group of men and women arguing in the parking lot just before the shootings. We had reports of two cars leaving the area at high speed after the shooting.

  In talking to residents, our guys were amazed we didn’t have at least ten shooting victims instead of one. A young father said he was in his apartment and heard gunfire, then screams from his four- and seven-year-old daughters. When he ran to their bedroom, he saw smoke that appeared to be coming from a hole in a metal closet door. He found an expended round on the bed beside the youngest girl, who said she had felt something burn her leg.

  Another parent found a bullet lodged in a wall just above her child’s bed. The child had been sleeping in it at the time of the shootings.

  A woman resident showed us where a bullet had entered her apartment through an outside wall just six inches above the floor, then penetrated the mattress she was sleeping on, just inches below her, and exited from the end of it.

  Yet another resident found fragments of a bullet in the pocket of her blue jeans—in her closet. The bullet had ricocheted off a dozen other points in the apartment before landing there. We eventually counted at least fifteen rounds after a sweep of the area by a local treasure-hunting club armed with their metal detectors.

  When our officers reported all this back to me, my first thought wasn’t about finding any suspects—it was about making sure there weren’t more victims.

  “We need to account right away for everyone who lives in these buildings,” I said.

  We obtained a list of all residents from the manager. Then we organized a physical search, knocking on doors, checking for other dead or wounded, and also looking for any suspects who might be hiding out, waiting for the smoke to clear.

  Is this your apartment? If not, where do you live?

  Of course, in this world, nobody lives anywhere. They stay. As in “I stay here sometimes. Other times, I stay somewheres else.”

  Going door to door in an unstable shithole environment like that is dangerous, nerve-racking work. You never know who will open the door, who will be hiding in the closet or under the bed. (Yes, they really do hide there in real life.)

  Guns are everywhere, so you have to be prepared to defend yourself at all times. Alcohol and drugs make the door-to-door search even more volatile. You might wake up a drunk-ass idiot or some drugged-out, methed-up maniac who knows there is a ten-year-old outstanding warrant with his name on it.

  Guilty or innocent, it’s not unusual for someone to go ballistic and berserk in these situations. It’s happened many times, believe me.

  But hey, it’s part of the job, and we did it that night and many others while praying that we would wake up the next morning staring at something other than a death shroud at the coroner’s office, or the inside of a hospital sheet.

  Fortunately, we didn’t find
any more victims, which amazed even a hard-nosed veteran detective like me. That night, bullets were flying everywhere at supersonic speeds. We kept finding more bullet holes in buildings and parked cars.

  We also learned that on the night before this shooting, dozens of shots from a variety of weapons were fired into the parked vehicle of a resident who just happened to be the aunt of Sonny Wright.

  We found that very interesting but also complicating. Was it a coincidence, or part of an attempt to kill or frighten Sonny and his family?

  BOYFRIEND OR FOE?

  When our guys asked Sonny if someone might have been trying to kill him, he had no problem coming up with several potential candidates. It seems our young friend was a player entangled in nearly every illicit game in the apartment complex.

  He’d been released from prison just two months earlier after serving about five months for violating his probation on a car-theft charge. Sonny also admitted that he had bought crack from dealers living there. He had also danced in and out of favor with several Crips gang members and their affiliated “Cripettes.”

  Their name may sound like a rougher version of Destiny’s Child, but this girl band didn’t make music. They were gang groupies.

  One of their associates was a lovely lass named Peaches, whom Sonny casually described as “my other girlfriend.” She was only seventeen and still in high school. Sonny, two years her senior, apparently had wooed and won her.

  But alas, Peaches turned sour.

  Just two weeks earlier, she had confronted Sonny, claiming she was pregnant with his child. She then demanded that he drop Sharon and see only her.

  Since Peaches made her demands while waving a gun in one hand and a heavy chair leg in the other, Sonny took her seriously. She also threatened to kill Sharon, who happened to show up during her tirade.

  (As a student of violence, I found this an interesting choice of weaponry. Why did she need the chair leg if she had a gun? Did she plan on shooting him and then bashing him with the piece of furniture? Or was she intent on bashing him and then shooting him? So many questions, but I digress. Back to Sonny and his list of potential assassins.)

  I was about to note that hell hath no fury like Peaches scorned when Sonny offered, with no little pride, that she was not the only pissed-off female threatening his health and welfare.

  He explained that on the Fourth of July, just eleven days before Coleman’s murder, he had an altercation with three Cripettes who frequented an apartment above his mother’s.

  One of them, known as “China Doll,” lit a firecracker and threw it at his car as he drove by. Unpleasantries were exchanged.

  China Doll then introduced a handgun to the conversation and fired several shots into the air. Sonny, who seemed to have a knack for inciting females with firearms, wisely left the scene.

  He confided to us that China Doll might hold a grudge against him still. We made a note to track down this new potential suspect. And then, just for good measure, Sonny threw out one more potential foe.

  A male known as “Crow.” Sonny said Crow accused him of stealing a gun, which Sonny denied. Still, once again, Sonny thought Crow might want him dead.

  I made a mental note not to stand too close to Sonny in public.

  a tangled web to unweave

  So, we had one homicide victim and a lot of bullet holes, likely from an AK-47, the weapon of choice for homicidal maniacs around the world.

  The obvious question we ask in every murder case is, “Who benefits from this victim’s death?” Did killing Sharon Coleman satisfy someone’s desire for revenge? With money? With one less romantic rival?

  Our list of suspects included Sonny and his many enemies, most of whom were gang members, gang groupies, or gang wannabes known only by their street monikers like Peaches, China Doll, Sea Dog, and, my personal favorite, Shitty Moe.

  Historically, Colorado Springs gangbangers were rarely affiliated with major city gangs. The entrenched urban gangs often were powerful, decades-old criminal enterprises with a well-defined hierarchy that had strict rules and strong-arm enforcement tactics.

  Until the early 1990s, most of our local gang members were nitwits—mere poseurs, pretenders, and petty criminals—although that didn’t make them any less dangerous. Wannabe gang members tend to overcompensate for their lack of true street cred with extreme violence and unpredictable patterns of behavior. Many act out to make a name for themselves. Many more are running scared. They don’t have the discipline that is enforced with real gangs.

  Urban gang members kill only under orders sent down by their bosses, who are older, more averse to prison time, and making a lot of money that they don’t want to lose. Rarely do street-level gang members randomly murder anyone who isn’t in a competing gang, isn’t a traitor to the gang, or doesn’t somehow pose a threat to the gang’s income.

  While the majority of our gang members were not affiliated with the big national criminal organizations, we were finding that gangs from LA and other major cities were setting up “franchises” to run drugs and guns in our area. They were recruiting from the wannabe local yokels to do their dirty work.

  The arrival of these more disciplined LA gang members had brought more violence because they were not shy about shooting anyone who stood in the way of their efforts to expand their drug markets in our area. This helped explain why 1991 was such a busy year for my homicide squad. And we weren’t the only cops working overtime.

  so many crimes, so little time

  Let me take you behind the blue curtain that surrounded this investigation from the get-go. This case was a bit more complex than most because at least two or three other investigations were already underway in that same apartment complex on the night that Sharon Coleman died.

  Many of the people living and hanging out at the apartment complex were also suspects or witnesses tied to two murders on the south side the two previous nights. One theory was that the shooting that killed Coleman was a retaliation for one or both of those previous homicides.

  There were also ongoing gang, drug-dealing, and gun-running investigations focused on many of the same players living or hanging out in the apartment complex.

  We had a bunch of cops staring into the same cesspool of more than a hundred suspects living in that complex. Between our homicide detectives, the narcotics squad, and the gangbusters focused on the area, we had to be careful not to trip over each other, or at least not to mess up each other’s investigations.

  Over the next four months, we worked together, trading information and also sharing informants. But we always had to be careful that they weren’t just repeating rumors or suspicions that spread like a virus in the underworld. Informants are usually addicts looking to trade information for cash or to stay out of jail. So it’s always a game with them.

  One of my favorite tactics was to search them and take away all their Bic lighters. They needed them to smoke crack, and they were tough to come by in that world. You’d be surprised how much information you’d get out of a crackhead if you flicked his Bic.

  Still, sorting out all the players, their street names, and the rumors and false information in this case proved difficult. Sonny’s own criminal activities made him an unreliable witness, as well as a suspect. For example, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out why someone shot up his aunt’s car the night before Sharon Coleman was killed. We wondered whether the two events were connected.

  However, we eventually figured out that Sonny’s aunt had a car of the same model and color as one that belonged to a noted gangbanger who lived in the same complex. His enemies meant to shoot up his car but targeted the aunt’s wheels by mistake. They totally aerated it with ammo. If the aunt’s car had been drivable, it would have whistled up a symphony.

  But it was the wrong target. Call it a case of mistaken auto identity.

  So that made Sonny a little less suspect
in his girlfriend’s murder, but not a whole lot less suspect overall.

  Maybe he didn’t kill Sharon Coleman, but maybe someone he pissed off was shooting at him and hit her instead. That seemed plausible given his astounding gift for making enemies of well-armed locals.

  We also had to consider that Sharon Coleman was simply the victim of random gunfire and that no one benefited from killing her. In that case, our list of suspects was unlimited.

  I told my guys that we couldn’t rule out anyone in that apartment complex, which was infested with violent idiots.

  We decided to let Sonny simmer for a bit. We looked at other reasons why someone would rake the complex with bullets that night.

  hitting reset

  Homicide investigations are often frustrating because all too often, your initial suspects may not pan out. Then you have to start over. This case made me crazy. Our initial focus was Sonny. We thought he might have been the intended target of the shooter, who sprayed the entire complex in the process.

  We spent a lot of time tracking down all Sonny’s enemies, but all too often, they had alibis or seemed to lack true bloodlust. One of these was his firecracker foe, the interesting young woman named China Doll. We tracked her down and brought her in for a talk.

  I have to say, she initially made quite an impression. China Doll was of mixed race—African American and Asian—and absolutely stunning. Nineteen years old. Raven black hair and emerald eyes.

  I thought, Good Lord, who is this?

  But then she opened her mouth, and all the power of her physical beauty vanished as she unleashed a shrieking, vile stream of abuse that made the paint on the walls curdle.

  I’ve been around the worst street creatures imaginable, and she made me want to grab my wife and children and move to a Tibetan monastery.

  China Doll was a worst-case scenario waiting to happen. She was a known drug dealer with an outstanding warrant. When I reminded her of that, she shot daggers at me. Then I asked if she might have been involved in the murder of Sharon Coleman.