Late on the night of December 15, 2010, Trevell
Coleman stepped out of the subway station at East 116th Street. The evening was
bitterly cold, down to almost 20 degrees. He wore a North Face parka and a
scarf wrapped around his head like a hoodie. He’d told nobody where he was
going—not his mother, not his friends, not his relatives—because he knew they’d
try to stop him.
With his hands jammed into his pockets, he began
walking up Lexington Avenue toward East 119th Street. For years, he had been
contending with flashbacks, nightmares, and intense feelings of guilt. The only
way to stop them, he now thought, would be to talk to the police. And at this
point, what did he have to lose? He was 36 years old and had almost nothing—no
job, no money, and no apartment of his own.
All he really had was a rap moniker—“G. Dep”—left
over from his days as a member of Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy crew. Earlier that
night, he had been playing the role of G. Dep once again, taping a
public-access TV show in the back seat of a car. It was a far cry from 2001,
when he’d been in regular rotation on MTV with “Let’s Get It,” the video that
turned the Harlem Shake into a dance craze.
But now none of that seemed important. All that did
matter was what he’d done half a lifetime ago, in the fall of 1993, when he
approached a man late one night, fired a gun, then fled. He never knew where
the bullets landed or what became of the man. And after seventeen years, he
decided he needed to find out exactly what he’d done.
Coleman had already visited the 25th Precinct once
before, not long ago. He’d spoken to a detective and given his cell number, but
didn’t hear back. As a police source would later explain to a reporter, Coleman
had been “high as a kite.”
Tonight, he was more clearheaded and had decided this
was going to be his last trip to the precinct. If he didn’t get any answers
this time, he would take that as a sign that he should move on and leave the
past behind. But there was a chance, he knew, that once he started talking to
the police, they might not let him leave. In fact, he might not get to walk the
streets of East Harlem again for a very long time.
Shortly before 11 p.m., he opened the door to the
25th Precinct and stepped inside.
In early 1993, Trevell Coleman was an 18-year-old
freshman enrolled at Iona College in New Rochelle. He’d made it through one
semester, but soon after the second started, he decided he’d had enough. He
called his mother and told her the news: “I’m leaving school because I want to
be a rapper.”
“A what? A rapper?” she said. “Are you kidding me?”
She had hoped he might become a lawyer—he’d had an
internship at a law firm when he was in high school—but she also knew he loved
music. For years, she had listened to him rhyming in the shower, and she’d
watched the composition notebooks pile up in his bedroom, each page filled with
lyrics. But who quit college to be a rapper?
If he stopped going to school, she told him, she
would stop supporting him: “You’re on your own.”
His mother had been 18 when she gave birth to Coleman,
and she’d raised him by herself in the Bronx and Washington Heights.
Eventually, she married a cop, got a job with the MTA, and bought a house in
Piscataway, New Jersey. At first, Coleman had commuted from there to his
Catholic high school, La Salle Academy, on the Lower East Side. Soon, however,
he tired of the 90-minute trip twice a day.
He announced he wanted to stay with his grandmother,
who lived in the James Weldon Johnson Houses in East Harlem. His mother wasn’t
happy about the idea—she’d grown up in this housing project in the sixties and
early seventies, during the heroin epidemic, and fled as soon as she got out of
high school—but she agreed to let him move in with her mother. She didn’t know
it then, but her son had already discovered an easy way to earn extra money,
having hung out at the Johnson Houses from an early age: sell a package of
crack and make $30.
After he quit Iona, he moved back in with his
grandmother at 1840 Lexington Avenue, where his 14-year-old cousin Boysie also
lived. To support himself, Coleman would stand outside on Lexington, on the
sidewalk in front of his grandmother’s building, selling cocaine. On a good
day, he made $200; other days his income covered little more than pizza and
marijuana. Whenever he saved enough money, he and a friend would go to the
Bronx and spend four or five hours at a recording studio.
“He was always good at what he did,” Boysie recalls.
“Like playing basketball, rapping. He used to get everybody’s attention over
that. And when people wanted to go out, they’d always ask him to go out,
because he knew how to get all the girls.”
About six months after moving back to East Harlem,
Coleman bought a .40-caliber handgun from a neighborhood dealer for $500. Among
his peers who hustled on Lexington, it was an unspoken code: “If you had enough
money to buy one, you ought to have one, in case anything happens.” And for a
teenager who was only five-eight and 165 pounds, owning a gun seemed an easy
way to appear more intimidating.
Coleman decided to use his new gun to make some extra
money on the night of October 18, 1993, a month before his 19th birthday. He
had never tried to stick up anyone before, but, he figured, it couldn’t be that
difficult. He slid the pistol into the waistband of his jeans, climbed onto his
bike, and pedaled through the Johnson Houses.
Just after 1 a.m., he spied a man in his thirties,
standing alone beneath the elevated train tracks at Park and 114th, smoking a
cigarette. Coleman leaned his bike against a car, strode across the avenue, and
pulled out his gun.
“Where’s the money at?” he asked, pointing his pistol
at the man’s torso.
The man didn’t respond.
“Where’s the money at?”
The man stepped toward him, caught Coleman’s eye, and
grabbed for the gun. Startled, Coleman squeezed off three shots. The man
winced, but didn’t make a sound.
Coleman darted back to where he’d left his bike,
threw one leg over it, and started pedaling as fast as he could. He felt the
man behind him, trying to grab him, and when he turned to look, he saw him stumble.
Coleman didn’t look back again and instead sped north on Park Avenue.
He made a loop—right on 115th Street, right on
Lexington, right on 112th—and then stopped at the corner of Park and 112th to
peek back at the spot where he’d just fired his gun. There was a car parked in
the wrong direction, pointing south on the northbound side of the street,
headlights facing him. And he thought he saw somebody kneeling over a body on
the ground.
Before anyone could spot him, he leapt back onto his
bicycle and raced home. His grandmother was already asleep when he snuck
inside. After stashing the gun in a dresser drawer, he collapsed on his bed
still wearing his street clothes, his face pressed into his pillow.
Over and over, he replayed the shooting in his head: his
finger pulling the trigger, the three gunshots, the man starting to fall. And
each time he hoped for a different ending, one where he looked up Park Avenue
and saw nothing—no car parked in the wrong direction, no body on the ground.
Perhaps it had all been just a very bad dream, he told himself. The thought
comforted him, and he clung to it, turning it over in his mind.
Coleman didn’t tell anyone what he had done and kept
to his routine in the following days. He hustled on Lexington Avenue, hung out with
friends, smoked marijuana—all while secretly terrified about the possibility
that the police might catch him. At one point, when he was walking up
Lexington, he saw two detectives in front of his grandmother’s building. It
looked as if they had just been talking to a small group of people and were now
getting into their car. But as Coleman got close, one of the officers popped
back out.
“Do you know anything about a shooting?” he asked.
His question felt routine, as if he had just asked a hundred other people the
same thing.
“No,” Coleman said, trying to act
nonchalant. “I don’t
know anything.”
As he walked away, he repeated the officer’s words to
himself, parsing them for clues. They had said “shooting”—they didn’t say
homicide. Maybe the guy was okay after all.
A week after the shooting, Coleman retrieved the gun
from his dresser, placed it in a shopping bag, walked the four blocks to the
edge of Manhattan, and tossed it in the East River. “That was the only way I
knew how to handle it,” he later explained. “I just tried to get rid of the
memory of it, of the whole thing.” But every time he passed 114th and Park, he
still found himself reliving that night: the sound of his gun going off, the
man wincing and stumbling. He began avoiding Park Avenue altogether.
Ten days after the shooting, the police arrested
Coleman for selling crack. Finding himself in Central Booking, he was consumed
by one thought: Are they going to come in here any minute and say ‘We got you’?
But the police knew nothing. The courts treated the 18-year-old as a “youthful
offender”; he got off with no state prison time, and his case was sealed.
One year passed, then two, and the cops never
arrested him for the shooting. “They didn’t come yet,” he’d repeat to himself
like a mantra. “Maybe nothing happened. Nah. Nothing happened. Nothing
happened.” His efforts to convince himself the shooting hadn’t even taken place
fell short. “At the back of my mind,” he says, “I knew something happened.”
His mother didn’t know what was going on, but she had
begun to observe changes in his behavior. He had always been soft-spoken, but
now he was quieter, more introverted. “He stopped smiling,” she says. “I
couldn’t understand why he was so serious.” Others, however, didn’t notice a
thing. “He seemed to be the same kind of kid I knew as a child,” says his uncle
Clarence Coleman. “He didn’t look like he was haunted by anything.”
In 1996, he was arrested three times in two months
for selling cocaine. His punishment: seven months in state prison. He was 22
when he got out. He had already become known in New York’s underground rap
scene; Gang Starr gave him a shout-out in the liner notes to their 1994 album
Hard to Earn. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his twenties in a prison
cell somewhere upstate, he decided, now was the time to get more serious about
his music.
In the autumn of 1998, Coleman found himself standing
on the corner of Lexington and 112th Street one night when a silver car rolled
down the avenue, its blue halogen headlights drawing everyone’s attention. The
driver pulled up to the curb and cracked his window.
“Dep, right?” he said. “Get in the car.”
It didn’t take long before everyone in the Johnson
Houses had heard the news: Puff Daddy had sent a Bentley to fetch Coleman.
Recently, Black Rob, a Bad Boy rapper from the Jefferson Houses next door, had
invited Coleman to appear on an album. After hearing Coleman in the recording
studio, a Bad Boy senior executive had pulled him aside and asked if he wanted
to sign a recording contract.
Bad Boy Entertainment released G. Dep’s first album,
Child of the Ghetto, in the fall of 2001. Vibe gave the album four and a half
discs and profiled him in a feature called “People on the Verge.” By then,
Coleman was 27 and had a 3-year-old daughter. With his daughter and her mother,
he moved to a townhouse in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
He had told nobody about the shooting, but even after
he’d left East Harlem, there were moments when memories of what he’d done would
bubble up. He would be at the movies, a tub of popcorn on his lap, watching the
screen, when one character would pull out a pistol and shoot somebody—and
suddenly he was right back in 1993, on Park and 114th. When he was younger,
he’d identify with the perpetrator on the screen—“I shot someone, too,” he’d
say to himself—but as he got older, he found himself empathizing with the
victim. In the middle of the movie, he’d start wondering if the man he had shot
at was still alive—and then he’d question whether he even deserved to be in a
theater at all, rather than in prison. The lights would go back on, everyone
would file out, and he’d leave with no memory of the movie he’d just seen.
Then there were the nights when he’d stay out late,
working or partying until 2 a.m., coming in after everyone else was asleep.
Sprawled on the sofa in the living room, exhausted and high, he’d find himself
obsessing yet again about the shooting. His paranoia about the cops catching
him had almost disappeared, but on nights like this he felt overwhelmed by an
intense fear. “Like my soul is going to burn in hell—that fear,” he says.
He had been smoking marijuana since the eleventh
grade, but after he signed with Bad Boy, he tried a “dust blunt” for the first
time—marijuana mixed with angel dust—and found that PCP helped alleviate his
torment in a way that marijuana never had. “It was really at a point where I
used to hear voices, and my conscience used to tell me: ‘What you did was
wrong,’ ” he says. “That was really the only drug that made me not think about
anything.” Before too long, he was smoking so many dust blunts that the
executives at Bad Boy took notice.
He’d signed a $350,000 contract with Bad Boy four
years earlier, but by the end of 2002, he was broke. After he lost his lease on
the townhouse in New Jersey, he packed the family’s belongings and drove to the
Johnson Houses. “Now I’m bringing the U-Haul right back up to 1840,” he says.
“It was depressing.” Not only had his career stalled, but he was living, once
again, just a block away from the scene of his crime.
Not long after moving back to East Harlem, Coleman
lost his grandmother—and his deal with Bad Boy. To cope, he began smoking more
PCP. The more he smoked, the more his rap sheet grew. Between 2003 and 2007, he
was arrested seventeen times, mostly for drug possession, sometimes for
trespassing (hanging out in a building that wasn’t his, often to get high), and
once for “theft of services” (slipping through the exit gate to steal a free
ride on the subway). Between trips to Rikers he tried to jump-start his career,
without much success.
“Everything fell apart,” says Boysie Coleman. “He
started using more. Everything changed about him. He wasn’t the person I grew
up with. He wasn’t talkative. He was zoned out.” His aunt Cecelia Coleman
recalls, “He was always preoccupied. He wasn’t socializing the way you would
normally do. Half the time he wouldn’t even say anything. You’d say, ‘How are
you doing, Trevell?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m okay.’ And that was it.”
By now, Coleman was married and had two more kids:
twin boys. He’d met his future wife, a former airline worker named Crystal
Sutton, at a nightclub and married her in 2004. His addiction to angel dust
made for a tumultuous relationship. She would enroll him in rehab programs, but
he never stayed long. And she could always tell when he’d just been smoking: He
would stutter, his whole body would shake, and his stench would remind her of
formaldehyde.
Several years after they got married, he told her
that he’d fired a gun at a stranger when he was a teenager. “One time he said
he shot someone and they lived,” she says. Another time, it was a slightly
different story: “He shot someone, and he doesn’t know what happened to them.”
She wasn’t sure what to think. Once, while he was high, he’d announced he was
Jesus. He’d also accused her of being a cop. At least three times, he’d been
carted off to hospital psych wards.
Coleman confided his secret to three other people,
too: his mother, his daughter’s mother, and a friend. He recalls that his
mother responded by saying: “Well, that was a long time ago, that was in the
past.” And then she’d change the subject. “I don’t think she really believed
me,” he says. “She was just bringing up other stuff: ‘Are you still going to
the rehab?’ She didn’t really want to talk about it.”
Coleman would sometimes mention that he was thinking
of going to the police. “I would bring it up just so people would be like:
‘Man, you can’t be serious. Don’t ever do that.’ And I’d be like: ‘You know,
you’re right,’ ” he says. He was hoping somebody would make a convincing
argument for moving on. “I just wanted somebody to say, ‘Don’t worry about
it,’ ” he says. But after a while, he found that no matter whom he told—or what
they said—nothing could quiet his conscience. “There wasn’t really an answer I
could get. I was looking for something that wasn’t there.”
In the spring of 2010, Coleman found himself lying in
a hospital bed with a fractured skull, stitches in his head, a bandage over one
eye—and no idea how he got there. The last thing he remembered was smoking PCP
and wandering onto East 115th Street. He thought that he’d been hit by a car,
but he didn’t know for sure. “You could’ve died,” his mother told him, “and I’m
not going to lose you like this.”
He entered a 30-day rehab program in June 2010 and
spent hour after hour sitting in groups, listening to other addicts share their
mistakes and regrets. “A lot of people were really cleansing their souls and
really getting to the root of their problems,” he says. “I was not. I would
just be embellishing, telling stories about getting high. I wasn’t being
totally honest.”
After finishing the program, he signed up for more
outpatient treatment at a hospital in the Bronx. He was trying harder to stay
clean than he’d ever tried before, but there were still slip-ups. On August 2,
a cop snapped a pair of cuffs on him after finding him smoking PCP in the
Johnson Houses, inside a stairwell at 1591 Park Avenue. On November 17, another
cop caught him in the same building with PCP.
It was no coincidence he kept getting arrested inside
1591 Park. The building overlooks the spot where he fired his gun back in 1993,
and for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, it had become a favorite place to
get high. He’d light up in the stairwell and stare out the window at the
Metro-North tracks above Park Avenue. “Maybe that was my way of confronting
that demon. Or maybe I was just becoming that demon. Or that demon was
consuming me,” he says. “That’s how crazy I was getting.”
At times, his life felt like a series of endless
internal calculations, all part of an effort to, as he later explained,
“balance myself out.” If he bought a coat, he might scribble on one pocket with
a marker before putting it on, just to deprive himself of the chance to wear
something completely new. He never had much money, and he was so determined to
give away what he did have that a few times he stuffed bills into the coin
slots of pay phones, then walked away. Afterward, he’d feel a little better—“I
did think, Well, okay, now I don’t have to feel like I have too much regret,”
he says—but the relief was only temporary.
Coleman and his wife had separated, but he still
stopped by to visit his 7-year-old sons. Some days, he’d be seated with them at
the table, sharing a meal, thinking how blessed he was to have such beautiful
boys, and suddenly be seized by guilt. Did the man he shot at have any kids?
What happened to them? And why should he get to spend time with his kids if
there was a chance he’d robbed another child of his father?
Soon after Coleman walked into the 25th Precinct on
that freezing night near the end of 2010, he found himself in the back of a
police car, riding through East Harlem. At the 25th Precinct, he’d admitted to
a detective the basic details of his crime: the location, type of gun used,
description of victim. Once the detective heard the crime’s location, he called
over to the precinct that covers that area.
By 12:30 a.m., Coleman was seated inside an interview
room at the 23rd Precinct, surrounded by cinder-block walls. A detective asked
him questions about what had occurred, then wrote down his answers, creating a
narrative of what he said he had done. The last line of his confession: “The
reason I turned myself in was because I felt awful about what I did and I
wanted to make it right for this guy’s family.”
What Coleman didn’t know was that before he’d walked
into this room, the detective had searched the precinct’s homicide log book and
found what looked like a match: John Henkel, white, 32 years old, shot on
northbound side of Park by 114th, “possible .40 caliber shell case.”
Only after Coleman signed his confession did he get
an answer to the question that had been haunting him for seventeen years: “I
just wanted to tell you that the guy died.”
In the hip-hop press, G. Dep’s confession became huge
news. Had he really gone to the police and snitched on himself? Online
commenters weighed in: “G-Dep is an idiot.” “Nobody does that-EVER.” “What a
dumb ass!” When Coleman’s family heard what he had done, they persuaded Anthony
Ricco, one of the city’s top defense attorneys, to represent him. They hoped
that the district attorney would let Coleman plead guilty in exchange for a
reduced sentence.
That didn’t happen, and last spring, the case went to
trial. Ricco tried to convince jurors that although Coleman confessed to a
shooting, the police had matched his words to the wrong cold case. He teased
out numerous discrepancies between Coleman’s confession and the Henkel
murder—color of the victim’s hair, color of his jacket, time of year the murder
occurred—but the jury didn’t buy it. In the end, it was Coleman’s own words—not
only the written confession, but a videotaped confession he gave afterward—that
got him convicted of second-degree murder.
An autopsy of John Henkel’s body revealed he’d been
shot three times: in the chest, abdomen, and back. His brother identified his
body, which featured a tattoo of the word love written vertically on his left
forearm. The night he was shot, he was carrying a billy club. His wallet held
only two bills: a $5 and a $1. A toxicology report later showed he had PCP in
his system.
Henkel lived in Ridgewood, Queens. Why was he in East
Harlem at 1 a.m.? “It’s logical to assume he was there for some drug-related
purchase or to use drugs in some manner,” the prosecutor told jurors. Nobody
from Henkel’s family testified, and there was no mention of any wife or kids
left behind.
When a New York Post reporter tracked down his
stepbrother Robert Henkel upstate to get his reaction to Coleman’s confession,
Henkel said: “I think he’s an idiot … He has three kids and a wife. It was
years and years and years ago. Finally, we’re not always thinking about it …
and now it has to be dug up all again … After all this time, yes, he just
should have shut up.” When asked to comment about Coleman for this story,
Henkel said, “He can go fuck himself. Okay? Good-bye.”
The jury’s decision to convict Coleman pushed both
his wife and his mother to tears. But when Coleman returned to Rikers and got
on the telephone, nobody could believe how he sounded. “He’s like, ‘Hey, how
you doing, man?’ ” says Jonathan “Kwame” Owusu, who was his manager. “He was
upbeat. It didn’t make any sense.”
Three weeks later, a judge sentenced him to fifteen
years to life. “I was happy,” Coleman recalls. “It sounds crazy to say you were
happy about getting a fifteen-to-life sentence, but I was. It just seemed to me
like the end of a nightmare … I was living in 1993 for seventeen years.”
Today, Trevell Coleman is prisoner No. 12-A-2293 at
Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison some 240 miles from
East Harlem. Now 38, he won’t be eligible for parole until soon after his 51st
birthday, near the end of 2025. And even then, there is no guarantee that the
parole board will release him.
One morning in August, he sits in a prison visiting
room wearing his usual attire: forest-green sweatshirt, matching green pants a
size too big, white canvas sneakers. Rosary beads and a cross dangle from his
neck, tucked inside his sweatshirt. A few white hairs dot his black goatee.
It has been four months since his trial ended, and
while he no longer seems buoyant, he insists he has no regrets. “I don’t know
how me being incarcerated—I can’t measure how much it makes anything any
better,” he says. “But I just know what I had to do.”
While on Rikers awaiting trial, he wrote a
memoir—300-plus pages, handwritten—almost all of it in rhyme. Writing comes
more easily to him these days, he says, since he’s no longer high all the
time—and no longer preoccupied with the past. “It wasn’t something I was going
through periodically; it was something that was like a knot at all times,” he
says, curling one hand into a fist. “Sometimes I didn’t even want to walk with
my head up. I just wanted to look down. If I stood up, I felt funny, like, ‘Who
am I to be looking up?’ ”
From the time he was a child, Coleman would always
tell his mother, “I love you, Ma.” She never doubted his sincerity, but for the
past nineteen years he barely ever looked at her when he said these words,
instead casting his eyes down and uttering the sentence as if it were a
question. On September 15, his mother and wife drove up to Elmira to see him.
They sat together at a table in the visiting room, and when he said, “I love
you, Ma,” he held his head up and looked her straight in the eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment