Before he was old enough to shave, Charles Robert Coleman had experienced traumas unknown to most adults. He learned about death, he knew despair.
Two years ago, his older brother hanged himself in his bedroom closet. About four months later, the state took custody of Charles, who was not being fed properly and sometimes had no place to stay. The boy’s sister later took over his care.
At times, Charles talked about wanting to join his brother. But he also displayed a remarkable resiliency.
In school, though diagnosed as severely learning-disabled, he worked hard to improve, and he hadn’t missed a day all year.
At the Elliott Donnelley Center, where Charles, 14, would go to play computer games or basketball after school, he was a prankster nicknamed “Bump.”
“He was just a real happy kid,” said Leslie Clark, who works at Donnelley. “Every time I saw him, he had a smile on his face.”
But horseplay becomes something different when a gun is involved, and resiliency of spirit means little to a bullet.
Charles was killed, police said, because a boy didn’t like getting slapped in the back of the head. That boy, age 13, was one of Charles’ close friends.
The playful roughhousing began at a party Wednesday in a 9th-floor apartment in the Chicago Housing Authority high-rise at 4120 S. Prairie Ave., where Charles lived.
Charles’ friend, apparently, didn’t want to be hassled. Priscilla Hardy, who was throwing a birthday party for her 9-year-old daughter in their apartment, recalled the boy’s warning to Charles and the others:
“If anybody smacks me, I’m going to shoot him.”
About 6 p.m., the party over, Hardy shooed the children out.
The older boys, she said, may have planned to continue the fun at an empty apartment, 906, sometimes used by youths who fire random shots from the dwelling. The windows are boarded up but the door is unlocked.
A hole in the board covering the rear window is large enough to shoot out of inside that apartment, according to police accounts.
Somebody smacked the boy who was carrying the gun.
It wasn’t Charles. But the boy, in a rage, fired two shots from his .45-caliber semiautomatic, police said. One bullet hit 16-year-old aymond Sims in his leg.
The other struck Charles in the chest. He died on a concrete floor, wearing a T-shirt with the words, “Floyd R.I.P,” a tribute to his brother. He was the 11th child age 14 or younger killed in the Chicago area this year.
One story making the rounds among building residents is that Charles was trying to stop his friend from shooting another boy when he was struck by the bullet.
Afterward, the boy told Hardy it had been an accident.
“He asked if (Charles) was dead,” Hardy said. “He said, `I swear I would never kill a friend.’ “
Police, however, are not treating the death as an accident.
The boy, who is not being named because he is a juvenile, has been charged with murder and attempted murder in a juvenile delinquency petition. A hearing will determine if he can be tried as an adult.
The case illustrates how easily children can get guns and how ill-equipped they are to handle such a deadly weapon.
“Most of the kids I know can buy a gun within 15 to 20 minutes,” Daniel Swope, who has worked with youths for many years, told a panel on gang violence this week.
An 11-year-old boy attending the party at Hardy’s apartment tried to buy the gun from Charles’ friend, Hardy said.
And her own son, growing up in an environment where violence and guns are commonplace, knows enough about firearms to comment about the boy’s .45. “It was like a 9,” the 13-year-old said, meaning a 9 mm semiautomatic.
Charles’ friend probably was not unfamiliar with guns either. He was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a firearm in September, charges that later were stricken.
“He acted in anger-that is how these things happen,” said Lt. John Regan of the Wentworth Area. “If they have guns, they have no qualms to use them. Kids get caught up in what they’re doing. Later everybody says, `I didn’t mean to do it.’ But that is later.”
In another era, a similar confrontation might have resulted in a fistfight, Regan said. The next day everybody would be friends again.
“With guns,” he said, “there is no next day.”
Nobody can say for sure what went through the boy’s mind during the shooting, or afterward. But before Charles was killed, the boy tried to let the other kids know how tough he was and bragged about an uncle whom he described as a ranking gang member, police said.
“Anytime he came to school he was talking about killing people,” said a classmate from Fuller Elementary School. “He said his uncle was an elite.”
All that posturing seemed to evaporate when he saw the blood pouring from his friend’s chest. Inside Hardy’s apartment, where police were holding him, the boy banged his head against her sink again and again, she said, all his rage now turned inward.
Earlier that day at Fuller, he and Charles had signed up for high school together. Both were on schedule to graduate from 8th grade. Both planned to attend King this fall.
The boy’s grandmother had hoped to keep him away from gangs and trouble by arranging his transfer from Bradwell Elementary, 7736 S. Burnham Ave., to Fuller, 4214 S. St. Lawrence Ave., a couple of months ago.
“I believed he was having trouble with gangs around here,” said the grandmother, who lives near Bradwell. “I know he did not want to get involved with the gangs.”
Like Charles, the boy was known as a well-mannered student. His teacher, Wilson Sullivan, noted that the boy had even at one point requested extra work.
Sullivan was surprised to hear that the boy was hanging around in the CHA high-rise, notorious in the neighborhood for its ties to the Vice Lords gang. “If I would have known he was hanging around there, it would have worried me,” Sullivan said.
The metal detectors installed by the CHA after one of its security sweeps provide little deterrent, residents said. A visitor can easily avoid the metal detector by sneaking up a stairwell out of sight of security guards.
“They do not search anyone,” said Frederica Coleman, 31, Charles’ sister and guardian. “They let a 13-year-old into the building with a gun.”
A CHA spokesman responded by saying, “If residents see problems, they should report them to management.”
The Coleman family has had its share of troubles over the years, both in the building and outside.
Charles underwent counseling after his brother’s suicide, but that was just one of many family crises he endured. One of his brothers, described by prosecutors as a gang member, is on Death Row in the Pontiac Correctional Center for a double murder. Another brother has served time for home invasion, records show.
His sister, Frederica, took custody of Charles in 1991. Not long afterward, she was shot in the chest during what she told authorities was an accident.
Charles’ mother is confined to a nursing home after a stroke paralyzed the right side of her body, according to Frederica.
By almost any standard, Charles had emerged from these potentially devastating circumstances with a sense of purpose and little anger.
“He was a good child,” Frederica said. “He was not selling no drugs. He did not hang out that much.”
Charles and Michael Twyman, 13, would sometimes go to church after school for Bible lessons or to the Donnelley Center.
Much of the time, they simply stayed inside-the only alternative to the dangers lurking in the graffiti-splattered corridors of Charles’ buildings or the violent streets outside. Charles liked to listen to rap music in his 12th-floor apartment.
Friends and classmates expressed a deep sense of loss over Charles’ death, as demonstrated in the cards composed by Fuller students.
A boy named Dion wrote, “This is to say that Charles was my best buddy ever.”
“Charles was a nice young boy, he was kind he was sweet he was hamsome,” a classmate named DaShonda wrote. Her punctuation and spelling where shaky, but her sentiments were heartfelt: “I will miss Charles.”
Assistant Principal Judith Riggins, in a staff memo, reminded teachers to let students mourn. She ended her note: “So very sad about the problems and violence that our youth of today face.”
DaShonda’s message, encircled by a heart, expressed the same regret.
“You was to young to die.”
