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Boy's Slaying Still Stuns Camden, N.J.

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By ANGELA DELLI SANTI and GEOFF MULVIHILL, The Associated Press

Published: December 17, 2007

CAMDEN, N.J. - Murders are not shocking in this city once called the nation's most dangerous. But even this place is shaken by the killing, still unsolved after five months, of a 12-year-old boy whose skull was so badly shattered by bullets that an undertaker used a top hat to hide the damage.

James Martin Coleman was in the back seat of a car parked at a housing project about 11 p.m. on the Fourth of July when he was struck by the spray of bullets. One resident of the neighborhood heard about 30 rounds.

As detectives seeking the boy's killers comb this desolate community of boarded-up row homes and litter-strewn lots, there are as many questions about the way he lived as how he died:

Why was a child who just turned 12 on the street, unsupervised, after 11 p.m? And where did the boy who once talked of becoming a preacher get the $500 detectives found stuffed in his front pocket?

Martin was the youngest of the 42 people killed in Camden this year.

Camden, a city of 79,000 in the shadows of Philadelphia, was once a manufacturing dynamo, home of RCA and a plant that canned Campbell Soup.

It has been on a decades-long losing streak, though, with disappearing jobs, deepening poverty and political corruption.

By the time James - "Pee Wee" to his father's relatives and known as Martin by his mother's family - was born in 1995, the city was among the nation's poorest.

Today, it's so tough that the Rev. David King, pastor of Community Baptist Church, pours motor oil on the stoop next door to his church, the only way he knows to keep drug dealers from sitting there.

Martin Bounced Between Homes

Loresha Gaines, now 28, was 15 and in foster care when she got pregnant with Martin. She moved in with a friend who introduced her to alcohol and marijuana. She said she was often left alone and in charge of her friend's six children.

While pregnant, Gaines said, she was beaten by drug addicts. Through it all, she talked to the baby growing inside her.

His father, Michael Coleman Sr., also has other children and was in prison for much of Martin's life. He was doing time for armed robbery when his son was killed.

Martin spent much of his life bouncing between the homes of his mother's and his paternal grandmother, Jackie Coleman.

Jackie Coleman said the young boy never did anything worse than break his 8:45 p.m. summertime curfew. She did not realize that sometimes he was staying on the streets overnight.

"We just didn't know he had gotten that far," she said.

Martin was killed in Branch Village, the public housing complex where his maternal grandmother, Monica Gaines, spent part of her childhood.

Monica Gaines, who now lives in Tampa, doubts it's possible to grow up in Branch Village now without using or selling drugs.

"It reminds me of Sodom and Gomorrah," she said. "It will suck you in."

Her cousin, Nat B. Woodward, said he tried to talk to Martin when he saw him hanging out in the projects, but the boy would not listen. He said he also called Gaines to tell her that Martin was on a dangerous path.

Woodward's hunch was that the boy, then just 11, was already working for drug dealers.

Still, Martin's mother and grandmothers knew things were troublesome enough for Martin that they plotted to get him out of the city, at least for the summer.

Gaines came for a visit in June intending to take him back to Florida with her, and Jackie Coleman raised $500 from relatives to help Gaines feed and clothe Martin in Florida.

The boy did not want to go. Just before his grandmother was to go south, Martin skipped a family meal and took a bus back to Camden.

Gaines said she told Martin she was worried about him, recalling her words: "Martin, please don't make Grandmom come back to New Jersey to bury you."

'It Was Going To Happen Anyway'

It's not clear how Martin spent the two days or nights before he died. His two primary caretakers thought he was with the other one. They now suspect Martin deceived them both, turning off the ringer on his grandmother's phone so his mother could not get through and grabbing the $500 in Florida trip money she kept on top of the television.

On the night Martin died, authorities said, the boy waited out evening thunderstorms in an old Oldsmobile left in a parking lot. They say friends came and went from the car that night.

Around 11 p.m., a group of people walked up to the car and someone fired an automatic rifle.

Word spread quickly. Before police got to her home to notify her, Loresha Gaines' father was banging on her door.

"Daddy, please don't tell me Martin's dead," she remembered telling him.

The day before Thanksgiving, investigators went with her as she knocked on doors in Branch Village, begging people for information.

"I want someone to come forward and speak up," she said. "That's all I'm asking for, mother to mother."

Gaines clings to what she's heard on the street: The Oldsmobile had been used in a robbery, then sold, and the victim was out for revenge and opened fire not knowing who was inside.

Acting Camden County Prosecutor Joshua Ottenberg said investigators have not ruled out that theory.

Gaines said she sometimes blames herself for what happened to her son, but like so many people in her city she sees tragedy as inevitable.

"It was going to happen anyway," she said. "Because it was God's will."

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