Detroit City Is the Place to Be (30 page)

One night while I was on a police ride-along with a Detroit Police Department gang-detail veteran named Harold Rochon, we were called to a reported shooting in this very neighborhood—actually, quite close to where my high school girlfriend used to live. Her parents took in severely disabled foster children for extra income, and a number of my rookie make-out sessions had taken place on a living room sofa across from a crib where a pair of encephalitic twins lay on their backs, occasionally moaning, the whole thing like a movie codirected by John Hughes and David Lynch. When I returned to my ex’s neighborhood with the Detroit police, it was close to one in the morning. The woman who’d reported the shooting lived in a small brick home with bars on the door. The porch was just a bare block of cement that had steps attached but no railing or awning or any kind of furniture. About a dozen people were milling around outside. Most seemed to be in their teens or early twenties. The complainant herself was probably in her late thirties and wore a loose housedress. She said her ex-boyfriend had slapped her daughter, prompting her nephew and the daughter’s boyfriend to roughly show him the door. He’d returned with two truckloads of men with guns and taken a couple of shots at the house.

“It was a red pickup truck,” a spindly guy wearing a skullcap and a long jersey shouted, slurring his words like a ham actor pretending to be drunk. “Niggas in the back of that bitch shooting and acting crazy, man. Y’all be late as hell.”

Another officer had already gone off in search of the offending vehicles, with no luck. Rochon told everyone to go back into the house and to call 911 if the men returned.

The woman became incredulous. “What if he shoot up the house? These niggas had
guns
. You know what I deal with? I deal with a baseball bat. I don’t mess with no guns. But you don’t touch my child. You don’t touch none of my kids. And then you wanna go get your niggas on some bitch shit? Nah!”

Rochon’s partner, attempting to reason with her, said, “If you’re outside, it ain’t gonna make it no better.”

“Realistically speaking, bullets can go through a house,” the daughter’s teenage boyfriend pointed out, not unreasonably, I thought.

“You’re more prone to be hit out here,” Rochon said tersely.

The boyfriend said, “It’s a fifty-fifty chance. I witnessed bullets go through walls with my own eyes. And hit people!”

“You need to go into the house,” Rochon said, “or if you’re that afraid, you need to go somewhere else for the night.”

For some reason, the guy in the skullcap had extended his arms in an about-to-be-frisked position and called to the officers, “Want me to stretch out, too? I’m used to it!” Then he began cackling. One of the younger guys told him to shut up.

I’m not sure how I expected the police to respond, but I suppose I figured it would be something more buoying than, “If someone is threatening to shoot up your house, don’t stand on the porch, and maybe leave for someplace safer.”

Once again, though, Rochon ordered everyone inside, threatening to arrest any minors who continued to loiter. Then we drove off to the next call.

*   *   *

The two defendants, Kevin Howell and Aaron Coleman, were to be tried simultaneously, though they had different lawyers. In court, Howell, the taller of the two young men, wore glasses and a white dress shirt, its collar unbuttoned to reveal a white crew neck T-shirt. He had a chunky, pear-shaped build, and an Afro and fuzzy sideburns that might have passed for intentionally retro, had not his glazed eyes and generally sedated affect made any deliberate fashion choices seem implausible. Coleman, a little guy, had a wispy mustache and wore his hair in braids that fell to the back of his neck. His outfit was fairly ridiculous: a cream-colored dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top, but with no tie and the wrong size, the shirt billowing piratically out of his waistband when tucked, making you think of a little boy posing uncomfortably for a First Communion photo. Still, he had trained his face to betray no emotion other than an icy soldier’s stare and, puffy shirt or no, he threw off an effortless menace.

The fact that no one else was covering the trial persuaded me to stick around and see how things played out. The story revealed itself as infinitely more tangled and needlessly tragic than even the incomprehensible grotesqueness of the crime in question might have portended. As evidentiary detail accrued, the circumstances leading up to the murder and its subsequent unraveling acquired both a depressing banality and a sense of doom as foreordained as Greek tragedy—here, taking the form of an urban pathology so deep-rooted and inescapable it came to feel conspiratorial, a form of predestination.

It went like this: One night, Kevin Howell was hanging out with Monique Foster, his ex-girlfriend. Foster was a very attractive nineteen-year-old, petite verging on alarmingly thin, still looking much closer to the age she’d been when she met Howell, which was thirteen.
4
They’d dated for three years and had an infant daughter, and remained close even after their breakup. On the night in question, they were lying on Howell’s bed at his mother’s house on Grandy Street, where Howell still lived, just chatting about old times and what their daughter, Teresa, also on the bed, would be like when she got older.

Then, unexpectedly, Howell had turned to Foster and said, “Remember on the news, when the body parts were found?” The crime had taken place a few weeks earlier. Foster remembered hearing about some arms and legs being found in a field in the neighborhood but hadn’t thought much of it.
5

Howell suddenly became serious. “I did that,” he told her.

Foster, startled, recoiled from the bed. When she turned on the lights and saw Howell’s face, she could tell he wasn’t joking.

He spoke in his normal (“mellow”) tone. He said a guy came to purchase crack from him and asked if he could smoke in the house. Howell told him no, go next door, and that was where he shot the man and took apart his body.
6

The story would have ended there—Foster, though scared by the confession and unable to stop thinking about it, had not gone to the police—but for a series of bizarre unrelated events. About a month after Kevin Howell’s confession, his older brother Brian was hanging out with Aaron Coleman, called “Mikey” by everyone around the neighborhood, and a few other friends, including a guy named Jermaine Overman, who happened to be the only other person who knew something about the murder.
7

Overman was a stocky but muscular twenty-six-year-old, handsome, with broad features and wispy hints of a beard and mustache. Cocky and performative, he was an old friend of Coleman and both Howell brothers. He also had a daughter with one of the Howell sisters, Sarah, whom he’d been dating for seven years. The day before the news about the body parts broke, he’d been out with Kevin and Mikey. They occasionally scrapped houses together, and that day after drinking gin and smoking weed by the river, they’d begun trawling Upper Chene in a van—Overman claimed he didn’t know who owned the van, though he’d been the one behind the wheel—until eventually, at Howell and Coleman’s direction, they pulled to a stop in front of the house on Hale Street where Morgan had been executed.

Overman said he thought the house had been chosen at random, for a scrapping job. It was after dark, and the place looked abandoned, “which,” he said later, “people who do scrap metal, those are the houses we target.” He didn’t find it unusual when Coleman and Howell led him directly to the basement, either, since “gas pipes, lead pipes, furnace, copper wire: that’s where everything of value is.” Kevin had been laughing and joking around, acting goofy. But once they got downstairs and Overman’s eyes adjusted to the light, he noticed what looked like a rolled-up sheet, or some other kind of covering, with a human head poking out of one end. Startled, Overman got himself out of the basement as quickly as possible, or so he later claimed. Rather implausibly, he also insisted Howell and Coleman said nothing about the body, not in the basement, not afterwards, though they’d definitely seen it and hadn’t seemed surprised or upset by its presence.

Whatever actually happened, Overman, too, never alerted the authorities. Nor did he sever his ties with Mikey and Kevin. And so a couple of months later, at someone’s apartment in the Martin Luther King Jr. housing projects, Overman found himself hanging out with Mikey, Kevin’s brother Brian, and a few other friends. A gun had appeared at some point—Overman professed not to know where it had come from—and Mikey and another friend, named Kevin Williams, started messing around with it, debating, specifically, whether or not it would be possible to kill two dogs with a single shot.

Eventually, they left the apartment in two separate vehicles. Their buddy Nathan Smith drove everyone but Mikey, who, alone in his own car, got pulled over by a cop.

“Oh, shit,” Overman said. “I hope he ain’t still got the gun on him.” Brian Howell was sitting in the backseat next to Overman. He was two years older than Kevin, not quite as tall, but thin and fit, and he crossed a room with a swaggering insouciance.

Nate, glancing in his rearview mirror, said, “Mikey about to go down.”

“No, not exactly,” Brian said. “Because I got it.”

He meant the gun, which he pulled out of his jacket. Nate, who had just gotten out of prison a week earlier, began to panic, as did Overman, especially when Brian waved the gun in his face in a reckless manner. Overman went to snatch the piece, and somehow, in the chaos, Brian accidentally squeezed the trigger.

“Everybody just got to freaking out,” Overman said.

Brian had shot Kevin Williams, up front in the passenger seat.
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It was bad. Overman leaped out of the car, gun in tow and made his way back to his girlfriend’s house, while Nate and the others raced to the hospital. Williams was already making disturbing choking sounds. “I jumped in the front seat and started slapping him, trying to keep him woke,” Brian recalled later. But this did no good: Williams died en route.

After leaving Williams’s body at the hospital, the friends reunited with Overman and decided to go to the police to explain what had happened. Overman didn’t think it was a good idea to walk into a police precinct with a gun, so he hid it under a bucket he found in an empty field across the street from his girlfriend’s place. The only other person who knew where he’d stashed the pistol happened to be Kevin Howell, who’d been home at the time.

When they arrived at the ninth precinct, it was 10:00 p.m., and despite their willingness to confess to a fatal shooting, the cops told them to come back in the morning. When the detectives finally got around to taking their testimony and asking to see the weapon, Overman led them to the bucket, but the gun was gone.
9

Brian Howell was facing an extended prison sentence. His mother, Mary, had been talking about the case to one of the detectives, who made it clear that the production of the accidentally fired gun would be very helpful in ascertaining the veracity of her son’s version of events. They weren’t buying the bucket story. Mary Howell knew Kevin had been around when Overman had hidden the gun, and she pressed him on where it might be. Kevin kept saying he had no clue. She didn’t believe him and was becoming convinced the gun must have had some darker history if he wouldn’t come clean to help his brother. Kevin admitted she was right, but that’s all he’d give up. His mother asked what the history had been. Kevin said he couldn’t tell her.

Not long after this conversation, Mary Howell was talking to Monique Foster, with whom she had remained close. They were discussing the missing gun, and suddenly Foster began to relay the story of Kevin’s confession. “My kids always knew: don’t tell me nothing you don’t want to me to know, or it’s ending,” Mary Howell told me later. “That day with Monique, when she started to tell to me about Kevin, I said, ‘Monique, I advise you to stop talking now, because I’m not gonna sit on it.’”

Foster told her anyway. After Mary Howell stopped crying—“it took me about three hours to pull myself together”—she called the police.

*   *   *

I visited Mary Howell one afternoon at her home on Grandy Street. Howell lived in a two-story wooden house with a peeling white paint job. One of the top-floor windows was partially boarded, and a blue tarp covered half of the A-frame roof. Only two other homes remained on the block, which looked like Greenwich, Connecticut, compared with the next block over, taken up entirely by the rubble of a three-quarters-demolished brick warehouse. One of the walls still standing read LAMINATED RECYCLING; closer to the Howells’ place, an exposed second-story bathroom appeared to have survived aerial bombardment, only the pink toilet still clinging precariously to the edge of the crumbling floor. Mary Howell said the warehouse had been like that for at least three years. An activist woman, not from the neighborhood, had come around once, trying to ascertain which demolition company had left such an unholy mess, but as Howell had told her, shaking her head at this lady’s naiveté during the retelling,
It was no one. The
community
did it
. By which she meant some entrepreneurial-minded fellows had showed up with chains and a truck one day and pulled the walls down themselves, carting away whatever they could sell.

“Brick farmers,” Howell explained.

Howell was fifty-one years old, with nine children, ranging in age from thirty-one to ten. Throughout the trial, she sat with four of her daughters, each one physically larger than the next, Howell relatively svelte by comparison, short, busty, her hair straightened and combed back from her forehead. She never once removed her cobalt windbreaker, even when she took the witness stand, which somehow added to the stoicism of her bearing. When I met her at home, we sat next to each other on the porch, on a couple of kitchen chairs with worn fabric seats. Part of the metal porch railing was held together with twisted pieces of wire. She didn’t invite me inside. Through her screen door, I glimpsed a stilled box fan and a hardwood floor spattered with what appeared to be white paint. It was a gorgeous spring afternoon, the neighborhood exploding with bird noises. Howell’s ten-year-old daughter, dressed like a princess on her way to a ballet lesson, had been sitting on the porch when I pulled up, and she’d literally danced inside to fetch her mother.