GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER: PART THREE OF A THREE-PART SERIES

The father

Why did Floyd Coleman have to do the police's work for them?

By A.C. Thompson

› acthompson@hushmail.com

The avenging family member features prominently in many a Hollywood action flick and more than a few comic books — from the Punisher to Spiderman to Superman. Those caricature-heavy tales are invariably laden with heroism and valor and ingenuity. This, however, is real life. And Floyd Coleman's tale is more sad than anything.

It's midday and Coleman, a bulky African American gentleman, sits in a quiet bar on a peaceful, tree-studded street not far from the governor's mansion in the heart of Sacramento. He's just come from the gym and is clad in a red sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. A Kangol-type hat covers his shaved head. A thin mustache specked with silver clings to his upper lip.

"I should be enjoying my life," he spits. "I'm retired. I shouldn't be going through this bullshit."

Perched on a bar stool, Coleman holds a framed 8-by-10-inch color photo as he talks. In the picture, taken in early 2003, he and his son Kevin are smiling broadly. A week later, Kevin Coleman was shot to death in the Lower Haight near the intersection of Webster and Page Streets. It was the middle of the afternoon.

As a result of the murder of his son, Coleman, who spent 28 years working as a Sacramento County probation officer, got a good long look at the inner workings of the San Francisco Police Department's homicide unit. It's safe to say he's not a fan. In fact, angered by what he saw as a lackadaisical attitude at the department — which, statistics show, is making arrests in only 22 percent of the city's murder cases — he took it upon himself to investigate his son's slaying.

And where the local cops failed, he succeeded.

The first bullet punctured Kevin's left hand, ripping through the flesh without breaking a bone, according to the medical examiner's autopsy report. The second bullet struck him in the torso, breaking three ribs, perforating both lungs, and punching a hole in his heart before exiting through his back.

He was quickly transported via ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital, where a team of surgeons went to work, cracking open his chest and attempting to close the hole in his heart with seven staples. Their efforts were futile. Lying on a metal gurney, Kevin was covered with a white sheet and declared dead 41 minutes after he was shot. He was 35.

Police, at first, had more luck than the doctors. Two undercover cops had been nearby when they heard the gunshots. They grabbed Anthony Johnson, who wasn't far from the site of the slaying, and recovered the murder weapon from a garbage can. A CSI team came out and recovered a shell casing and photographed the blood splattered on the pavement.

But then things started to fall apart, according to Coleman.

The cops, led by homicide inspectors Tony Casillas and Thomas Walsh, had trouble locating witnesses, a common problem in murder cases and in violent crimes in general. They were also having trouble finding one of the perps. What evidence they did collect suggested Johnson hadn't acted alone. But they couldn't find the second suspect.

An old friend of Coleman's in the District Attorney's office called him. As Coleman remembers it, the prosecutor said the case was disintegrating — given the lack of witnesses, the murder charge against Johnson might be reduced to manslaughter. At that point Coleman decided to open his own inquiry.

On a professional level, he was well acquainted with murder. As a probation officer assigned to the county's Gang Suppression Unit, Coleman had spent years immersed in Sacramento's Crips vs. Bloods gangsta culture, helping prosecutors construct cases against gun-equipped hood heavies. And for six years he'd headed the Northern California Gang Investigators Association. "I've testified in 25 homicide cases," Coleman says today.

Pushing his grief into the background, he began working the phones and scouring the Western Addition and the Lower Haight for leads. Before long, a tipster put him in touch with a woman who had information about the case. The woman, who hadn't spoken to the cops, met him on a street corner.

She gave him a slip of paper with a man's name on it and gestured to a nearby house, the man's residence. The person in question, she said, had seen everything. Then she walked away.

Coleman promptly knocked on the man's door. Though the guy lived only feet from the crime scene, the police had never contacted him — and he'd chosen not to call the cops to inform them that he'd witnessed a murder. Despite the source's obvious reluctance to get involved in the case, Coleman was able to pry loose a key clue: The second suspect was a character named Antonio Woods, who'd lured Kevin to the scene of the slaying while Johnson retrieved the gun from the trunk of the car.

Coleman convinced the witness to take his story to the homicide detail, where it reinvigorated the case. In September 2004, roughly 19 months after Kevin's violent demise, police arrested Woods and charged him with murder.

Despite Coleman's success, the whole chain of events has left him incredibly bitter toward the SFPD. "Do they give a fuck?... How come I gotta drive 105 miles to do their job?" he asks. "They should give me their paychecks."

If SFPD detectives don't feel compelled to go out and investigate, "they should get desk jobs," he says.

According to Coleman, local cops were excruciatingly slow in busting Woods, who fled to Los Angeles after the killing. "They never went to LA to look for him. The only reason they caught him is because he came back to town," he claims.

Later, during a monthlong trial, it became clear that Woods and Johnson killed Kevin in retaliation for a verbal argument and fisticuffs that had occurred earlier that day.

On January 20, 2006, a jury found the duo guilty on all counts. Johnson went down for first-degree murder and being a felon in possession of a handgun, while Woods was convicted on the same charges, as well as two cocaine possession offenses. The two men, both in their 20s, are each facing multidecade penitentiary terms, though neither has been sentenced yet.

Both Coleman and the witness he tracked down testified during the course of the trial. He has high praise for Assistant District Attorney Eric Fleming, who prosecuted the case. The DA's office declined to comment on Coleman's allegations, though an anonymous source at the Hall of Justice confirmed the broad outline of his story.

Police spokesperson Neville Gittens declined to comment for this story.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — who went to the police academy and worked as a DA's office investigator before being elected to represent the Western Addition — has been critical of the SFPD's approach to gunfire in the neighborhood. Late last year he sent a memo regarding the city's murder boom to Mayor Gavin Newsom saying the department needed to improve its ability to cultivate witnesses. "Crime scenes grow cold when witnesses aren't sought vigorously and aggressively," Mirkarimi wrote.

Regarding the Coleman case, Mirkarimi tells the Guardian, "This example underscores the need for a complete retooling of how witnesses are solicited in communities ravaged by crime."

Coleman admits his son wasn't a paragon of angelic behavior. A high school all-American in track and football, Kevin dropped out of college, bailing on a scholarship to Sacramento State, and moved to Oakland. After leaving school he got himself into a fair amount of trouble, including a bust for assault with a deadly weapon, a crime that put him in a cell for three years. One of his cousins is currently facing federal murder and racketeering charges for his alleged involvement in a Western Addition gang.

At the time of his death, Kevin was planning to move up to spend more time with his dad. "He was supposed to move up here. I'd rented him an apartment," Coleman recalls.

"It was very tough," Coleman's friend Rhonda Smith says, tears cascading down her cheeks. "And even today it's still tough."

After a lengthy conversation, it's obvious that one thing really bothers Coleman. For nearly three decades, he devoted himself to the law, but the law wasn't nearly as faithful to him. "This," he notes, "is why a lot of people say, 'Forget calling the police.' " *