Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  China Doll was not amused, but she was not stupid. She settled down and played nice—after I threatened to bust her on the warrant and throw her ass back in juvenile prison.

  When I asked about her fireworks flare-up with Sonny, she played it down, saying he apologized a few days later and it was forgotten.

  “We were cool,” she said.

  I had no real leverage over her, and her story had the ring of truth despite her obvious malice. I let her go, but later in the investigation, she would give up some key information.

  Next up on our list of suspects was Peaches, whom Sonny had identified as his “other girlfriend,” the one who had claimed to be carrying his child and threatened him with both a chair leg and a handgun if he kept seeing Sharon.

  She had also made threats to kill Sharon. Peaches was definitely a gang groupie, so maybe she had one of them do her dirty work. We called her mother and had them pay us a visit at the station.

  Peaches and China Doll must have read the same playbook. She came in playing the hard-ass, too. She was still a teenager and thus safe from being locked up in jail.

  I put the fear of God into her, reminding her that being an accomplice to murder qualified her to be charged as an adult.

  “We could throw you in with the big mean girls, Peaches. They’ll have fun with you.”

  She mellowed but maintained that she had no reason to want Sharon dead. “I’m not pregnant,” she said. “I never was. I was just trying to get Sonny back.”

  She also said she was in the apartment complex, getting her hair done by a friend, when the shooting occurred and Coleman was killed. She and her friends left, figuring rightly that police would soon descend. She had witnesses to back up her story. So we let her go with a promise to stay in touch.

  target or collateral damage?

  I called in all our homicide detectives and we regrouped. When we hit a dead end like that, I generally like to go back and review the crime scene evidence to see if anything fresh jumps out at me. In this case, I went down to the garage where the police lab keeps vehicles we’ve seized. I wanted to take another look at Sonny’s car.

  Our crime scene guys had been all through it and I’d read their reports, so I didn’t expect to find anything new. I just wanted to go back over the evidence. I checked out the two bullet holes in the passenger-side door, and it struck me again, harder this time, that maybe this car wasn’t the target.

  Maybe it was just passing through the field of fire. Maybe the shooting had nothing to do with Sharon Coleman or Sonny or any of their enemies. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But if so, who or what was the real target for this crazed shooter?

  Someone in that apartment complex knew the answer to that. Probably more than one. It was time to turn up the heat on the bad guys and girls, and the best way to do that is to bring them in on criminal charges and threaten them with prison time if they don’t give us the straight story.

  Given all the well-documented drug activity by gangbangers and their groupies in the apartment complex, I asked our Metro Vice Narcotics, and Intelligence Division to set up surveillance. I wanted to shake up the drug dealers and their customers and see what fell out of their pockets or their mouths.

  My philosophy was always that our gang was tougher than their gang, and we had more toys. Narcotics cops are especially good at surveillance. They used a variety of vehicles and methods to get photographs and videos of the drug traffic in the complex.

  All very low-key and stealthy. Even back then, before drones, we were way beyond the unmarked van sitting out front. The bad guys had no idea we were recording their every move. Our ninja narcs gathered up ample evidence of ongoing criminal activity so we could get search warrants for a raid.

  bringing the heat

  Call me a Colorado cowboy, but I love a good roundup. We rode into the vipers’ nest with a heavy show of force and a lot of noise, blowing doors off hinges and blinding ’em with stun grenades, known as “flashbangs.”

  We then filled up a couple of paddy wagons with the dazed and confused. We also collected massive amounts of evidence including rifles, shotguns, handguns, ammo, drugs, and some very incriminating photographs.

  There was a method to our madness. The criminal activity we recorded gave us leverage to pry information out of those we hauled into the station. They were all tough and put up a united front until they were looking at serious time behind bars.

  One of these was a seventeen-year-old, Amber, who was arrested in possession of illicit drugs that qualified her for a stretch in the big-person prison. She became much more cooperative when we laid out that unpleasant future.

  Amber lived in the apartment complex. She and friends were “chillin’ ” there when the shooting started on the night of Sharon Coleman’s death. They ran down the street to the home of a high school friend, Mike Wood, who lived with his parents.

  They were hanging out in the basement so they wouldn’t wake up his mother and brother. After a while, one of Mike’s gangbanger buddies from Los Angeles showed up, and the party suddenly got very quiet.

  According to Amber, the menacing stranger told her and her friends that he was sorry he’d scared them when he shot up their apartment complex.

  “I wasn’t shooting at you,” he said. “I got a little trigger-happy with some East Coast Crips.”

  This was very welcome news.

  “What was this guy’s name?” we asked Amber.

  This dude’s name is “Khaki,” she said.

  a khaki killer?

  According to Wood and others we interviewed, Khaki claimed to be a member of the Eighty-First Street Crips, and they were at war in our fair city with the local branch of the East Coast Crips, who had just moved into Amber’s apartment building. The local yokels had established their own freelance drug dealership in competition with Khaki’s Crips, who preferred to have a monopoly.

  We learned from residents and informants that Khaki’s shooting spree was meant to send the rival drug dealers a message that he was not a free-market advocate and that they had better shut down or be shut down.

  He confessed all this to the girls on the night of the shooting but told them not to talk about it among themselves and their friends.

  “This is some stuff we’ve got to keep between us,” he warned them. “You know what I’m saying? We’ve got to keep this on the low level.”

  Khaki went on to make his point with a bit more emphasis, Amber told us. “He said if we say anything, he’ll kill us all. I believed him. He is one scary dude.”

  Amber’s assessment was on the money. I’m the first to question the authenticity of our local gang member wannabes, but when I checked with our gang unit, they said Khaki had bona fide credentials.

  There is no Eighty-First Street in Colorado Springs, but there is in LA. Our man Khaki was a top lieutenant with an infamous affiliate of that city’s South Central Crips, a well-organized national criminal enterprise that had established a presence in our town as part of its drug network expansion.

  He was a true badass working on assignment from his LA gang leaders. He traveled back and forth between Los Angeles and Colorado Springs on red-eye flights, slipping in and out of town without drawing attention from authorities.

  This was in the days before heavy security screenings of air passengers, so Khaki could go through airports carrying weapons and sacks full of his gang’s drug profits. You might say Khaki was their Rocky Mountain regional sales representative—and hitman. LA gang experts said he was widely feared and known to be armed and dangerous.

  Amber told us that she thought Khaki left our town and returned to LA after unleashing his deadly barrage of bullets on the apartment complex. Our roundup paid off. We walked away with a new likely suspect in the killing of Sharon Coleman.

  what’s in a nickname? />
  We had this dude’s street name only, a physical description, and a reputation to track, but that was a good start. Nobody knows anyone’s real name in the world of drugs and street gangs. They like it that way because it’s harder to track them down.

  But my gang of good guys had access to a national database of criminals and their aliases. It is called the Moniker File, or the AKA (Also Known As) File, and it often comes in very handy when tracking down nameless yahoos involved in crimes. The database also attached the real names, photos, and fingerprints to aliases and fake identities.

  Like many gangbangers, Khaki had a long list of street names, although many of them were just mangled versions of “Khaki,” which seemed to present spelling challenges for both law enforcement personnel and informants alike. My personal favorite version, found on some of our police reports, was “Kkkyha,” which had a sort of ironic twist to it.

  Khakee, Krakee, Kwaki—whatever! The shifty son of a bitch had a lengthy criminal record but had somehow avoided extended prison time. This investigation had already dragged on for three months, so I was determined to change that as quickly as possible.

  Our chances of identifying someone were even better if the target of our desire had an unusual street name like Khaki. In his case, when we searched the Moniker File, we got a hit that identified him as Anthony Charles Blevells.

  We put in a call to the LAPD and asked for any information their gangbusters and narcotics units had on him. They knew him well, by several names and nicknames. And as luck would have it, they had one of our target’s known associates in custody, facing prison time and perhaps willing to play Let’s Make a Deal, with Khaki as our prize behind curtain number one.

  going hollywood

  I sent one of my ace detectives to LA that night on a red-eye flight, which sounds very Raymond Chandler, detective noirish. He wasn’t there to look up anyone’s Hollywood star. He had a date with a really bad actor, instead.

  Let’s call our informant “Homey,” because he grew up in the same LA neighborhood as Khaki, and they had hung out there and in Colorado Springs over the years. Homey said Khaki had called him a week after the Coleman killing in my town and said he was coming back to LA.

  “He told me, ‘Oh, man! I was shooting at some East Coast Crips, and I smoked a bitch.’ ”

  Our detective gritted his teeth and made a note of Khaki’s cold, cold heart.

  Homey added that Khaki had a fondness for AK-47s—the weapon used to kill Coleman and strike terror into the hearts of the entire apartment complex.

  “He kept saying that the cops had nothing on him because he got rid of the gun by having someone throw it in the river,” said our new best friend. “I’m not positive, but I think he said it was a river in Grand Junction.”

  Homey had been locked up for a while, and he claimed not to know Khaki’s whereabouts. He also warned that along with multiple nicknames, his buddy from the hood had a suitcase full of fake IDs.

  Our detective made a comment that we had identified his real name as Anthony Blevells, which brought a smile from Homey. He then coughed up a critical bit of information.

  “Naw, man,” Homey said. “That’s what I thought, too. A lot of people say that’s his real name, but it’s not. That’s just another of his fake names. I know his real name because one time I was at his mother’s house with him and she called him ‘Jude.’

  “I asked about that later, and he said his real name was Jude Hood,” Homey said. “I swear. You’re never gonna find him, man. He’s got a buncha fake IDs and he’s got connections all over the country.”

  To which our guy replied: “Yeah, well, thanks for your concern, but my mother thinks I’m pretty smart, and I’ve got a few connections myself. See ya in the movies, man.”

  hey, jude

  Jude Hood? Now, that sounds like a fake name. In fact, we had a couple of other people mention that as one of the aliases he used, but we had believed that Anthony Charles Blevells was his real name.

  You live and you learn. We checked it out, and sure enough, California had three records of him being arrested under that name for controlled substances, forgery, and vandalism, among other things. Even better, California records had a photo of him, and fingerprints. His real age was twenty-four.

  We plugged all we had on Khaki and his multiple identities into yet another major resource, the National Crime Information Center. It’s a vast database run by the FBI, and it provides the good guys who chase bad guys with an instantaneous connection to more than ninety thousand other local, state, and federal criminal justice and law enforcement agencies.

  Within seconds of entering his information into the NCIC computer system, every lawman in the United States and Canada had access to that information and the fact that he was wanted in a murder case.

  grand jury time

  By this time, we had put together a grand jury investigation to put pressure on all Khaki’s playmates. Most law-abiding citizens may have heard of a grand jury investigation, but unless they’ve been called to serve on one or testify before one, they have little idea of what this critical tool can do to help detectives involved in a protracted and complex investigation.

  To put it simply, the grand jury is a hammer and a vise for law enforcement. We often serve grand jury subpoenas to witnesses and suspects during protracted and complex investigations like the Sharon Coleman case. The goal is to force people to testify under oath. They are told that if they lie to a grand jury, we can charge them with first-degree perjury.

  In a case like this, everyone lies. When dealing with a community of dope dealers and gun runners, you are shocked if someone actually tells the truth. To sort out the liars, the district attorney orders up a grand jury investigation, which has very wide subpoena power. Criminals and their defense lawyers hate grand juries, which is a good sign as far as I’m concerned.

  Regular citizens are chosen from the voter rolls to serve on a grand jury. While they are usually timid at first, they soon learn that on a grand jury, they can ask questions of the witnesses, too. It doesn’t take long before jurors are acting like hard-nosed cops and prosecutors themselves, taking notes on testimony, asking tough questions, and demanding answers. Their names are protected, so that makes them even more aggressive.

  Grand jury cases are usually more interesting than run-of-the-mill criminal trials, and the jurors tend to bond with each other, the prosecutors, cops, and all the courthouse crowd. We had one lady who everyone hated to see go off grand jury duty, because she baked the best cookies in the world and brought them in every day. I wanted to have her called back, but you can serve only a year.

  There is a strong element of drama and intensity in grand jury hearings, which, unlike regular trials, are conducted in secret. No press. No observers. Witnesses can bring their defense attorneys, but the lawyers are not allowed to ask questions or otherwise get involved. And if someone decides to “take the Fifth” so they don’t incriminate themselves, we can lock their asses up without bond until they get tired of being in jail and decide to tell us what we want to know.

  They lock the doors and put paper over the windows to the courtroom, so no one can hear or see what’s going on inside during the grand jury hearings. Witnesses sit in the hallway, sweating out their turn. We like them a little rattled and scared, not knowing what is going on.

  We don’t let them talk to each other, because we don’t want them conspiring to tell the same story. So they worry about getting caught in lies. As a result, it’s not unusual for witnesses to go at each other in the hallway.

  They also can say crazy things on the stand because they get confused and think this isn’t a real trial. I love it when that happens.

  We once had a guy who was under investigation for robbery, kidnapping, and homicide. He was dumb as a rock, and dangerous. We had belly chains on him. When the DA said, “What is your occupation?
” he just stared at him.

  I was sitting next to the DA, and I tugged on his jacket and said, “He doesn’t know what ‘occupation’ means.”

  “What do you do to earn a living?” the DA said.

  “I rob people,” said our guy.

  The grand jury gasped. His defense lawyer put his hands over his face.

  Trying to recover, the bad guy then let rip with this statement: “But I ain’t never killed no motherfucker!”

  Just for kicks, I then suggested that the DA ask this doofus what he does every morning.

  His response to that question was the same thing he had once told me: “I go to my friend Stanley’s crib, and we look for places to rob.”

  After that testimony, I thought the grand jury was just going to bring out a rope and hang him on the spot.

  But again, I digress. Back to the vipers’ nest!

  caught in a lie

  With the grand jury underway, our investigation homed in on Khaki, the man of a hundred identities. He did have a lot of friends—or, at least, a lot of people who were afraid of being his enemy. They were prepared to lie for him, even under oath, so we asked each one of them if protecting Khaki was worth ten years in prison for perjury.

  “We will charge you with that, convict you, and put you away for that amount of time if you don’t tell us the truth,” we said.

  We weren’t playing nice. When you are dealing with criminals and lowlifes, the old saw about catching more flies with honey does not apply. Only the hammer and the vise and threats of long-term incarceration work with the hard-core crew.

  “We will destroy your life and lock you up with people who will break you and use you every day for their own purpose and pleasure.” This is strong motivation, in my experience.

  Loyalty and even fear of revenge go out the window when you paint that picture. And then I always add, “I never make a promise I can’t keep, and I never make a threat I can’t carry out, so when I tell you that I’m going to fuck up your life, you can believe I will do it until you tell me the truth.”