Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  Mary Howell’s call to the police had resulted in the questioning of Monique Foster and Jermaine Overman and ultimately the arrest of Mikey and Kevin. Still, on the level of forensic evidence alone, the prosecution’s case remained basically nonexistent. No fingerprints or DNA connecting the young men to the crime had been discovered. David Morgan Jr. had most likely died from a gunshot to the head, but since his head was still missing, there was no official cause of death, and the gun suspected as the murder weapon had disappeared from under a bucket. In fact, the abandoned home where Morgan’s murder allegedly took place had mysteriously burned down forty-eight hours after the body parts were discovered on Hale Street. By the time the police arrived to search for Morgan’s missing head, the condition of the house was deemed too structurally unsound to allow the cadaver dog to enter. The day after Morgan’s torso was found, Coleman’s alleged drug house also burned to the ground.11

  Lacking a solid case, the district attorney had offered Howell a plea bargain, which would have entailed a 27½-year sentence in exchange for an admission of guilt. Howell not only rejected the offer but became so irate when his court-appointed attorney, Wayne Frost, brought up the plea during their first meeting, he refused to speak with Frost again until the morning of their first day in court.

  Despite the problematic evidence, the two sides were utterly mismatched. The young, meticulously prepared prosecutor, Raj Prasad, a compact presence with a high, reedy voice, couldn’t wait to lay a series of PowerPoint presentations on the jury. Frost, on the other hand, had a beleaguered air. He read haltingly from a yellow legal pad and did not call any witnesses of his own. Aaron Coleman’s attorney, Brian Gagniuk, an almost comically baby-faced man12 who nonetheless comported himself with a practiced and lawyerly flamboyance, was probably the most impressive of the bunch, but had a minor role thanks to the lack of any direct evidence against his client.

  For the state, the most damning testimony came from Monique Foster—underlined when Prasad played back a jailhouse phone conversation between Howell and Foster. In the recording, Foster has obviously been weeping. “I hope that everything goes as you want it to go,” she says, pausing between words to sniffle.

  Howell, belying his rather dim courtroom presence, sounds confident in his reply. “They subpoena you, they can’t force you to testify,” he tells Foster. “You ain’t got to.”

  Foster says, “I don’t know, Kevin.”

  Before she’s able to continue, a computerized phone-company voice interrupts to say, “Thank. You. For. Using. Evercom.”

  On the stand, Foster, dressed in high boots, tight black jeans, and a bright pink zippered sweatshirt, became visibly upset during her testimony. Foster admitted she’d only told the police about Howell’s confession out of fear of losing her child. “They said I was looking at conspiracy and could get life,” Foster said. “Honestly, today, I don’t want to be up here. I love this man.” She exhaled deeply, and her voice hitched. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I put my child’s father behind bars.”

  Frost, during his opening argument, anticipated Foster’s testimony and launched directly into an obfuscating Hail Mary pass, insisting to the jury, “The prosecutor wants you to connect dot after dot after dot. This was a guy trying to get back together with his girlfriend! He saw something on the news, and he was trying to act important. This is a different era, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to the music they sing now. He was simply bragging the way they do in rap music now. I’m pretty sure they [rap artists] don’t actually kill police officers just because they sing about it.”

  Before closing arguments began, Hathaway considered the case against Coleman, who had not been directly implicated in the killings by anyone except the prosecutor. Monique Foster never claimed Kevin Howell said anything about Coleman’s participation in the murder or dismemberment; Jermaine Overman had simply described Coleman as being present the night they’d entered an abandoned home and seen a dead body; Brian Howell, in his testimony, would only say Coleman had been selling crack.

  Prasad endeavored to argue that, regardless who committed the murder, the dismemberment would have required at least two people.

  Judge Hathaway frowned. “The dismemberment apparently occurred after the murder,” he murmured. “But I don’t know if that’s a two-man job. I really don’t.”

  Prasad chuckled in an unsettling way and said, “When I say it’s a heavy job, judge, I mean it’s a heavy job. That torso alone weighed fifty-eight pounds.”

  Gagniuk, Coleman’s attorney, stepped forward and announced, “Last Tuesday, Your Honor, I cut down five trees. It was a two-person job, but I did it myself. I have pictures on my phone to prove it. It was probably not the best idea. But I did it.”

  Once this debate exhausted itself, Hathaway dismissed the charges against Coleman, but he continued to express reservations about the overall logic of the prosecution’s case. “It just doesn’t make much sense as a motive,” he said, rubbing his temple as he stared down at his notes. “They wanted to kill a random guy buying drugs from them?”

  “The unfortunate analogy,” Prasad countered, “is The Godfather.”

  “So they killed one of their own customers?” Hathaway asked. “It just doesn’t make sense as a way to drive the competition out of the neighborhood. I still don’t quite get the motive, at least as presented.”

  Prasad smiled nervously and acknowledged, “It might not be the best way to do business.”

  “Why wouldn’t they do it to one of the competitors if they really want to reenact The Godfather?” Hathaway continued, apparently not quite understanding Prasad’s reference, which clearly had been meant to recall the scene where one of Don Corleone’s enemies, the recalcitrant Hollywood producer Jack Woltz, wakes up, horrified, beside the decapitated head of his beloved prizewinning racehorse.

  Prasad diplomatically replied, “I understand that.”

  Hathaway shook his head and said, “I understand expecting reason from people who have never evinced reason in their lives is like whistling in the wind.”

  Jury deliberation began on a Thursday and continued the following morning. I shifted back and forth between the courtroom and lobby, waiting alongside the victim’s family and Howell’s mother and sisters, the two sides respectfully steering clear of each other, but without a trace of discernible hostility. Morgan’s sister, Gwen Thomas, was smartly dressed in a navy blue suit and a large beaded necklace. She said her family was originally from Detroit’s east side. She lived in the suburbs now, where she ran her own marketing and public relations firm. As she spoke, she mostly kept her gaze focused on a binder in her lap, where she was rearranging some papers for work. “My brother was a product of the sixties,” she told me. “Now athletes take drugs, they go into treatment. Back then, they didn’t know. He started out with heroin. I have my theories on how those drugs got here. They ruined cities like Detroit. The last time I saw David was three years ago. He came to our sister’s funeral. Somehow he’d found out about it. Got a suit and everything.”

  About a half hour later, the jury announced they had reached a verdict. My heart clenched. All morning, I’d felt tremulous and expectant. Adding to the drama, several extra bailiffs had been brought into the courtroom as a standard precautionary show of force in case the defendant or any of the spectators reacted badly to the verdict. Their presence had the effect of making it feel as if an eruption of violence should be considered highly probable.

  The jury found Howell guilty of first-degree murder and mutilation of a body. One of Howell’s sisters burst into tears and fled into the hallway. Morgan’s family also wept. To my surprise, I found myself tearing up as well. I wasn’t even sure why. I’d been upset when Coleman’s case had been dismissed, even though, logically, I understood the evidence hadn’t been there. The prospect of Howell’s also walking had been gnawing at my equanimity. But when the foreman read the verdict, the full tragedy of the situation finally hit me—the senselessness of
Morgan’s death, Howell’s own wasted life, the appalling loss afflicted on both families.

  Outside, in hamhanded, bathetic fashion, dark storm clouds had been massing over the city, and suddenly it began to pour. Morgan’s family emerged from the courthouse shortly after I did. His sister opened a giant Motor City Casino umbrella and together they marched toward a nearby parking structure for the rival Greektown Casino. Farther in the distance, heading in the same direction, I could see Mary Howell’s blue windbreaker, as she walked, arms linked, with one of her daughters.

  * * *

  My ride-along with Lieutenant Rochon coincided with a new initiative by Chief Godbee called “Operation Inside Out,” in which the Detroit Police Department’s patrol squads would be reinforced by cops who normally worked desk jobs. The Inside officer driving our squad car told me his regular job mostly entailed going to high schools and talking to kids about drugs and crime. As austerity-era public relations, Operation Inside Out had an obvious “more-with-less” appeal, but its efficacy as a policy struck me as dubious. At one point in the evening, we had to race across town to a shooting. The Inside cop, who was driving, kept fumbling with the siren and flashing lights. We also had no GPS and occasionally got turned around. Sometimes less was simply less, no matter what you did with it.

  More often, anticrime measures in Detroit did not resemble paramilitary raids so much as containment policies. A certain degree of crime could be ignored as long as the fulcrum of change in Detroit (downtown, the university district, and the handful of other neighborhoods where the city’s elite actually live) remained safe and relatively unaffected. Short of fundamentally changing the underlying conditions producing such high levels of violence and illegal activity in the first place, policing could do only so much, so the best-case scenario amounted to hoping the criminals stuck to killing one another and kept the collateral damage to a minimum. This approach plays out in the coverage different crimes receive in the local media. For example, when a random white teenager is carjacked in broad daylight at a suburban fast food restaurant and his dead body turns up a week later in an abandoned home in Detroit—as happened shortly after I moved back to the city, dominating headlines for weeks and even reaching a national prime-time news show—the event amounts to 100 percent collateral damage and elicits corresponding levels of civic and media outrage. On the other hand, one drug dealer killing another or hacking up the body of a crack addict as part of an inane turf war—well, in that case, the collateral damage plummets closer to zero, and the outcome of the ensuing trial barely merits a newspaper blurb.

  In fact, the unspoken attitude toward violence in Detroit today isn’t radically different from that of Mayor Charles Bowles, who held office during the Purple Gang’s heyday. “It is just as well to let these gangsters kill each other off, if they are so minded,” he said in 1930, after a murder spree in which twelve bootleggers were shot and killed over the course of eleven days. “You know the scientists employ one set of parasites to destroy another. May not that be the plan of Providence in these killings among the bandits?”

  David Morgan Jr. was no bandit, of course. But expand Bowles’s sentiment only slightly and even some of the best-intended ideas for reinventing the city begin to take on a disturbing purgative aspect, undertones of a cleansing that leaves no room for the likes of Morgan or Jermaine Overman or Mary Howell. Aside from burned-out buildings and overgrown lots, what’s missing from the Tomorrowland renderings of Detroit 2030, with its monorails and Christmas tree farms and office parks and Apple stores? Oh, right: poor people.

  * * *

  An appeals lawyer approached Howell after the trial and offered to take Kevin’s case. “But he wants $4,000 down ASAP, and then he wants $550 a month,” Mary Howell told me when I visited. “I can’t afford no appeal attorney.” She hadn’t been able to visit either of her sons in jail since the trial ended, because she had no car and seats on the van service running loved ones out to the prisons got expensive. She figured she’d probably be able to visit once or twice a year, and whenever she could afford to send her boys money orders for phone cards, they could give her a call.

  Of the young men close to Kevin Howell, Aaron Coleman remained in jail on EWOP (“entering without permission”) charges related to scrapping. After the trial ended, I learned that Coleman’s older brother Jason was serving his own prison sentence for the strangulation of his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Jalona Stafford, on Valentine’s Day several years earlier. They’d been at an EconoLodge motel in the suburbs, arguing over a television program. After killing Stafford, Jason Coleman had driven her body back to Upper Chene, dragged it inside an abandoned pickle factory, and set the corpse on fire. Neighbors reported seeing a stray dog running down the street with her leg in its mouth.

  Jermaine Overman, meanwhile, had been portrayed throughout the trial by his own friends’ attorneys as an unreliable and perhaps even sinister character. The judge made no attempt to feign neutrality on this issue—he did not like Overman—and even Prasad acknowledged the credibility problems of a witness who admitted to having committed crimes with the very two (alleged) crack-dealing sociopaths he hoped to convict. Surprisingly, though, when I approached Overman after his testimony, he agreed to meet up and chat.

  I texted him the following week. Within moments, I received a text back reading, cryptically, “Mr Holly Kartel.” I didn’t understand what this meant, so I just called him. Overman answered. He did not explain the text but said that he remembered me and that we could get together the following day.

  Overman lived in a low-income housing complex on Chene Street. When I pulled into the parking lot, he was standing outside, and we drove over to a diner in Eastern Market for a late breakfast. Overman was in a pensive mood. He’d just come from a government office downtown, where he had been sorting out an unspecified problem involving his birth certificate. His parents needed to be present and so he had ended up seeing them for the first time in eight months. “How was that?” I asked. He shrugged and said, “Awkward silence all around. That’s like a CD on loop. It’s gonna play that way forever. Some people are better at a distance.”

  Overman was the second-youngest of ten kids. His family had briefly moved to Sacramento when he was five, but money became funny and they’d returned to Detroit a few years later. “I pretty much raised myself, basically,” he said. “Both of my parents were in the house, but it was like they weren’t in the house. That left me as a loner. There’d be times I’d be out of school for weeks, just waiting to go back.” School had been Frederick Douglass Academy, which Overman described as “like a motherfucking clubhouse. One teacher good, but he like one finger in a fist. The others just let you lounge around. If they’d balled that fist up, maybe it would’ve worked.” Frederick Douglass closed three years ago. The graffiti-covered building, now missing most of its doors and windows, remained one of the major eyesores of Upper Chene; occasionally, you’d see neighborhood kids tossing basketballs through the rusting, netless hoops on the old court. Overman said he’d scrapped the place but hadn’t thought to grab his old locker.

  Though Overman almost certainly knew more about the killing of David Morgan Jr. than he was letting on, he didn’t come across as a dangerous guy. He spoke in an adenoidal baritone, and snickered at his own jokes, and almost shyly brought up the rap songs he’d write alone, at night. After ordering a western omelet, politely calling the waitress ma’am, he said of his friend Kevin Howell, “I can’t imagine him doing that.” He wouldn’t say much more about his testimony or his thoughts as to what had really happened. Of Coleman, he said, “No matter what we scrapped, what we did, he always had money. He was trying to get custody of his kid, so he was always saving. You could hand him a dollar with your signature on it and he’d still have it in a month.”

  He insisted he had no idea what happened to the gun that accidentally killed Kevin Williams and possibly intentionally killed David Morgan Jr. “I don’t fuck with guns,” Overman told me. �
��I don’t even know how to load the clip or switch the latch or whatever you call it. And I didn’t want that gun in my house. I have a three-year-old daughter.” Overman didn’t deny scrapping and even acknowledged having “filled in” on the odd occasion for drug-dealing friends, when he was younger, earning seventy bucks or so for a few hours’ work. As a kid, he’d always thought he’d be some kind of builder—he loved making things—but now there was no work and cash was tight. Scrapping, you might get two hundred dollars’ worth of metal out of a good house, which, even split three ways, wasn’t bad money. “It’ll keep me maintained as hell,” Overman said.

  In the middle of our breakfast, Overman’s girlfriend called. After speaking with her for a few moments, he grimaced and hung up. It seemed that her friend wanted a ride to Hamtramck and was willing to pay, the main hitch being Overman’s girlfriend did not possess a valid driver’s license. Overman told her not to do it, but she seemed intent on making the quick cash. “Women don’t be wanting to listen!” he muttered, scooping up a forkful of omelet. “They just wanna drive. I don’t want to sound sexist, but it’s true.”

  We left the restaurant and went for a quick ride around the neighborhood. As we rolled alongside the decimated blocks of Upper Chene, Overman provided a running commentary: “This place used to be a liquor store. It’s been burned for about twelve years. It’s kinda crazy, because as the fire department was putting the fire out, you had people busting in on the other side taking the liquor out. Black people owned this place here for a minute, but it’s already gone. This shit been fucked up forever. Black people owned this clothing store—see the NBA sign? Didn’t work out, though. Location, location. People are looking at us riding down the street. We look like investors, like we coming to rush everybody out. Well, you do.” He laughed hard at this. “I got chased out of this building right here, with the water tower on top of it? The guy had on a cop badge, but he was security. But all in all it looked the same, so we got out of there. We wasn’t doing shit anyway. We was just casing it out to see if there was money to be made. Cool little church right here. Historic buildings, that’s what I’m into. I like the architecture, that design and shit. This is where they gave us free lunch, for schoolkids. I really don’t hang around with too many people, because too many people bring trouble, as you can see. Now I’m seeing people doing straight cocaine. They call it the rich man’s drug. I didn’t even think that was our cup of tea.…