D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray was alarmed enough by Sunday’s shooting of 19-year-old David Lee Robinson to show up at a vigil and express his exasperation. “He was being robbed for his Nike tennis shoes,” the mayor said. “A life for a pair of Nike tennis shoes? Come on, ladies and gentlemen. It is time for us to be able to end this type of tragic violence in our society.”
Young David’s demise in a shootout on Foote Street Northeast was one of the first homicides this year of the senseless variety that take too many lives in our town.
For a type of murder that might be easier to prevent, I would direct the mayor to the killing of Elaine Coleman. A much-loved resident of the Kingman Park neighborhood in Northeast, she was stabbed to death Dec. 4 by her boyfriend, according to charging documents.
If David Robinson’s shooting over a pair of sneakers was random and senseless, the demise of Elaine Coleman was specific and preventable. It was a crime of domestic violence, which takes the lives of too many women in D.C.
Coleman, 47, was a cheerful woman.
“She was my neighbor,” a commenter wrote on the Homicide Watch website, which covers every D.C. murder. “She also worked at the Shoppers Food Warehouse down the street from my house. We would talk from time to time when I would come in the store. And the last time I had seen her we talked about her kids, and I talked about mine. A beautiful soul that will be missed but never forgotten.”
What some casual acquaintances missed was that Coleman had a troubled relationship with John William Smith Jr. Coleman’s neighbors knew they fought. Smith’s co-workers at Roadside Cafe, across the Maryland line, knew he had a murderous streak.
“I’m going to kill that bitch,” he said to one co-worker, according to documents filed in Superior Court. He even predicted the murder weapon would be scissors.
On Dec. 4 police found Coleman dead in her apartment. The medical examiner reported she had been stabbed 41 times — with scissors — and wounds to the back of her neck “almost decapitated” her.
Police quickly investigated and found plenty who would talk. The cops arrested Smith, 47, and prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder.
What should enrage us is that the same John Smith was arrested in July 2005 for killing someone with scissors in Baltimore. He was charged with first-degree murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter in January 2006.
He was sentenced to eight years, which should have kept him behind bars until 2014. Apparently he was out on probation.
Add it up: A man stabs a person to death with scissors, pleads to manslaughter, gets eight years and serves five. Co-workers hear the man threaten to kill his girlfriend. They do nothing. The judicial system failed Elaine Coleman. Smith’s co-workers didn’t report his threats. They failed her, too.
Mayor Gray would have more impact and save more lives if he talked up this case and strengthened the system against domestic violence.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
