There's nothing easy about losing a son.
And there's nothing easy about watching TV and seeing your son's killer go free.
That's what happened to Earline Coffey (at left, in a photo by The Sun's Jed Kirschbaum) in late May. She knew the man conficted of killing 15-year-old Tyree Wright had been granted a new trial because a police report calling a witnesses account into question had never been disclosed to the defense. But no one told her that prosecutors were dropping he case entirely.
So she turned on her television on May 25 and saw the suspect smiling as he walked out of a downtown courtroom. All she could think about was how Tyree died in her arms, smiling up at her blood poured from his head and onto the steps of her Federal Street rowhouse.
"I don't think it's fair for him to be out and my son is six feet under," Coffey told me this week.
Coffey called the newspaper (we have a full account running Sunday in the Crime Beat column in print and on the Internet) after an account ran of the charges being dropped against Tyrone Jones, who is now 33, and had spent nearly 12 years in prison for the June 1998 killing. Police said Tyree was hit by a bullet as he sat on his steps; his mother said the shooter was aiming at somebody else.A
A reporter had tried to reach Coffey but couldn't, and she called us after the story appeared. She was angry about the way she found out about the case ending and confused as to why.
Jones (at right, in a photo by The Sun's Kim Hairston) won the right for a new trial with the help of Maryland's Innocence Project, which helps overturn wrongful convictions, and prosecutors determined they couldn't retry the case with the scant evidence left over. The witness account was not useless and gunshot residue found on the suspect's hands has been called unreliable by many experts. But prosecutors apologized to Coffey for failing to fully explain that the man convicted in her son's killing was being released.
All Coffee can remember is smiles. She cringes at the thought of Jones smiling on TV as he walked out the courthouse a free man. And she cries as she remembers the smile her son gave her on his deathbed.
She told me she's never fully gotten over Tyree's death. He was a stellar track player at Patterson Park High School, studied hard and wanted to go to college and moved to California to become a police officer. The suspect to had been arrested once on a drug charge that wasn't prosecuted, but had been attending a community college in Texas and was home on break when the shooting occurred.
It's a happy moment for Jones, a sad moment for Coffey, compounded by the oversight that kept her in the dark and forced her to discover justice undone by seeing a smile on her television screen.