Christopher Coleman lived like a real gangsta’. In December 1995, Coleman and a fellow gangsta’ named Derrick Graham accepted a contract to kill off rival drug dealers of a Colombian named Enrinque Andrade Mosquera to whom Mosquera owed money. Mosquera arranged a meeting with his drug rivals. So it was that on December 13, 1995, less than two weeks before Christmas, the trio drove to a dead-end street in a violent Houston neighborhood known as “Acres Homes” where they parked and waited for the arrival of Mosquera’s drug rivals. They didn’t have to wait long. At 2:00 a.m. a car pulled up behind the Mosquera vehicle. Jose Luis Garcia-Castro was driving the second vehicle. In the car with Garcia-Castro were his girlfriend, Elsie Prado, her three-year-old son, Danny Giraldo, and her brother, Heimar Prado Hurtado.

            Things quickly turned gangsta’ ugly. The trio got out of the Mosquera vehicle and walked back to the Garcia-Castro vehicle. One of the trio spoke to Hurtado, the man to whom Mosquera allegedly owed money. Coleman was not concerned with any small talk. He had been hired to do a dirty deed. He pulled out his weapon and opened fire on the passenger side of the Garcia-Castro vehicle. When all the firing was done, everyone in the Garcia-Castro vehicle was dead, except Elsie Prado who was found seriously wounded when the police arrived a short time later.

            Elsie Prado survived her wounds and told the police she would never forget the face of the killer. Yet she had difficulty picking the shooter’s photo from the trio involved in her shooting, but she managed to identify Coleman as the shooter just three days after the shooting. Coleman was arrested a week later at a motel in Lewisburg, Tennessee and was extradited back to the State of Texas. He gave the Houston police a recorded statement that he was present when the Garcia-Castro murders were committed but denied being the shooter. A jury didn’t believe him. Based on Prado’s testimony, and on what former Harris County Assistant District Attorney Luci Davidson told the Houston Chronicle was “other circumstantial evidence,” the jury found him guilty of capital murder and assessed his punishment at death.

            In separate trials, Mosquera and Graham was tried, convicted, and given life sentences because jurors could not agree on whether the death penalty should be imposed on them.

            The Coleman case developed an interesting twist several years ago. What Prado did not tell the Houston police or the jury that convicted Coleman was that she had a prior “acquaintance” with Mosquera. She admitted to this relationship in 2007. According to a Houston Chronicle report (September 23, 2009), Mosquera has said that he and Prado were more than acquaintances; that, in fact, they came from the same town in Colombia and had “done drug deals together.”

            In a September 21, 2009 interview with the Chronicle, Coleman’s attorney, Pat McCann, said the Prado/Mosquera relationship was significant impeachment evidence the Coleman jury should have heard. “Her [Pardo] testimony came in unimpeached because his lawyers did not have the information to impeach it,” McCann told the newspaper. “I don’t think anyone can sit there and say they know the truth. Who the shooter was is a huge question.”

            Before his cancer death last year, Coleman’s lead trial attorney, Dick Wheelan, gave a statement supporting McCann’s position: “The fact that these two people [Prado/Mosquera] knew each other has tremendous importance in this case. It would give Ms. Prado a reason to lie. It would also indicate that she was much more deeply involved in the drug trade than she admitted. It … calls into question her truthfulness in general. Had I known there was a prior relationship … it would have changed my investigation on both guilt/innocence and punishment, as well as significantly altered my strategy and tactics for the trial.”

            This new evidence notwithstanding, the State of Texas on September 22, 2009 shortly after 6:00 p.m. put Coleman to death by lethal injection. No one was there to witness the execution except for state officials and media representatives. The 41-year-old former Army veteran turned gangsta’ killer died as he had lived. The Chronicle recorded his final statement as: “Ain’t no way, fo fo. I love all of y’all.”

            Coleman was convicted of a triple homicide. All the victims were part of the same family household. This month of September has been a horrible month for family violence. It began on the first day of the month when 8 family members were found brutally bludgeoned to death in a trailer home in Georgia—the murders apparently committed by a family member. This tragedy was followed by a mother and her five children being found murdered in their Naples, Florida home with her boyfriend being the prime suspect in the killings. These two mass killings were followed this week by a family of four being killed in Virginia by a “horrorcore” music rapper and a family of five being found slain in an Illinois home. The fact that the latest FBI statistics show the nation’s murder rate dropped last year got torpedoed by these mass murders.

            Coleman’s pleas for fairness (that there was no real evidence he was the actual shooter), therefore, fell on both judicial and public deaf ears. He was a conspirator in a triple homicide. His fairness plea didn’t stand a chance of being granted, especially in Texas.

SOURCES:

Coleman v. Quarterman, 456 F.3d 537 (5^th Cir. 2008)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6632106.html

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/6628623.html