Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Marqueise Coleman

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Marqueise Coleman had his whole life ahead of him when he was shot to death in a trailer in North Carolina – all because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police say this horrific crime can be solved if someone just speaks up, and his family and friends won’t rest until he gets justice.Anyone with information about Marqueise’s case is asked to contact the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office at [phone] or [phone]. In order to be eligible for the $8,000 reward, the tip must be called into Crime Stoppers at 910-865-TIPS (8477). Tips can be left anonymously.For more ways to help support the Coleman family in their fight for justice you can visit the Justice for Queise Facebook page or their GoFundMe: Seeking Justice for Queise. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-marqueise-coleman/.

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is about a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. But his bright future was snuffed out in an instant because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As if the heartbreak his family and friends have endured isn't bad enough, there is the anger, frustration,

and fear from knowing that whoever committed this ruthless crime is still out there, probably right in their small community. And police know that this case can be solved if someone just speaks up. This is the story of Marquise Coleman. Shoot the news. It's 2.41 a.m. on Thursday, July 29, 2021, in Robison County, North Carolina, when this

call comes into the 911 Dispatch Center. The address of your emergency? We need an ambulance, please. What's the address? I need an address. What's your name? Okay, tell me what's going on. Call the body.

Call the body. Listen to me tonight. Nobody will be there at the house, and she will show you how to get here, please. Okay, listen, honey, listen. You need to cooperate with me. Okay, I need to know what's going on. Someone shot up the house. They shot up the house.

They shot my cousin, please. Okay, where is he bleeding at? He's in the house. Baby, listen. I'm trying to help you, but you need to help me. Go there. She will take you to the house. Okay, thank you.

We got it. Thank you. Bye-bye. So I know some of that might have been hard to make out, but the caller is saying that someone shot up the house and shot her cousin. Yeah, it sounds like there was yelling in the background. Right, and between all those redactions, it also sounds like Dispatch was having some trouble figuring out where she was calling from.

But as you can hear from the audio, they do manage to pull the address. It's a trailer park on North Alfred Road in the small town of St. Paul's. Just a couple of minutes after and one town over, Tanisha Coleman's phone rings. It's 2.45 a.m. and she's in bed but not asleep. Actually, she had stayed up late to look over some papers. Her youngest child, 19-year-old Marquise, needed for college. Marquise, who everyone just calls Queese, is going into his sophomore year at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.

So Tanisha goes to answer the phone, but by the time she grabs it, the caller hangs up. But then it rings again. It's a friend of hers named Crystal. And she tells Tanisha that she just got a panicked phone call from someone who's with Queese. Here's Tanisha, who spoke with our reporter Nina. Yeah, they had called her because they couldn't get in touch with me. She said Queese been shot. Crystal tells Tanisha that Queese is over at his friend's house, a guy that we're going to call William.

Tanisha knows that William's place in that trailer park on North Alfred Road is about 10 to 15 minutes away from her house. And there's no time to lose. So she jumps out of bed and wakes up her mother Janice. But before they can even get out the door, Crystal calls again and she tells Tanisha to go to the hospital instead. The ambulance hasn't shown up at the trailer park yet and people with Queese have decided to drive him to the hospital themselves. Wait, why didn't the ambulance show up? Well, we got a copy of the dispatch report, but it's so heavily redacted that it's hard to make sense of it almost. But as far as we can tell from the report, the ambulance did arrive, but it took like 11 minutes and 13 seconds from the time that that 911 call was made.

Gosh, I mean, 11 minutes. That must feel like a million years to someone in that situation. Exactly. And I don't know like the average EMS response time, like there, what that is, but Robinson is a really large rural county. It's literally almost the size of Rhode Island. So I'm sure that in a lot of cases, it just makes more sense to do what Queese's friends are doing and just like get him there themselves. Right. I mean, I grew up in a rural area. It would be faster to drive the 30 minutes to the hospital on your own than it would be to wait for the ambulance to get there and then drive you up there. Yeah, even if they're speeding, like going both ways is going to take longer.

Anyway, Tanisha and Janice get in her car and head to the hospital. And Tanisha is stunned, but she's trying to stay calm. Her friend didn't have any details about what had happened to her son or how badly he was injured. All she knew was that he had been shot. The way we go to the hospital, there's like a bridge. It'd be a two way lane. When me and my mama was going down the road to the hospital, I looked in my real real mirror and I seen a car coming up real fast. They went around me.

That's how fast they were going to the point. I thought they would get ready to go over the bridge. That's how fast they was going. The fast car belongs to Queese's cousin, the young woman who called 911. She had driven Queese to the hospital. And when Tanisha pulls into the hospital parking lot, she sees them stopping by the emergency room doors. So Tanisha rushes over to them just as Queese's friends are getting him out of the car. They were hard and they need help. They need help. They didn't come out fast.

So somebody ran in there and they got to stretch it themselves. A nurse comes outside and checks Queese's pulse. The look on her face tells Tanisha that the news is bad. But they get him inside and his loved ones sit in the hospital waiting room and wait. As word spreads, more and more people start showing up. Friends, relatives, former teammates, coaches. I mean, it seems like the whole town of St. Paul's is in the waiting room or outside of the hospital just praying for a miracle. Meanwhile, police have a shooting to investigate.

Two crime scenes as well. They have Queese's cousin's car and the mobile home park, which is like right outside of the town line. So the Robison County Sheriff's Office gets the case. And Major Damien McClain, Detective Brent Oxendine and Lieutenant Matthew Dimmery go to the hospital. Here is Detective Oxendine, the lead investigator on the case. When we arrived on scene at the hospital, we were actually informed that he was deceased at the time. What gave me hope when we first arrived at the hospital was the parking lot of the emergency room was filled with loved ones and his friends. I mean, I just knew that, you know, we were going to hopefully get some good information.

And here's Major McClain. I've been doing this for 17 years. I've never seen that many people at one location at one time. Not long after the investigators arrived, Tanisha and her mom, Janice, are brought into a private room. You can't tell me what's going on there in front of everybody. You want to call me in the room? It's not good news. I already knew he was gone. A doctor breaks the same news to them that investigators just got. Queese, the baby of the family, has died after being shot multiple times in the chest. The Sheriff's Office says that he was pronounced dead upon arrival.

Although, according to the autopsy report, doctors did try resuscitating him and his time of death is listed at 3.36 a.m. Now, investigators waste no time. They know that lots of the people that they need to speak with are probably already right there in the waiting room or outside. So they get to work. We begin to do interviews at the hospital. We start getting what they know and what they've seen. They also find out a bunch of stuff about Queese. It seems like everyone knows each other in small towns, but Queese is especially popular.

Before he graduated from St. Paul's High School in 2020, he had been a star running back on the football team, the Bulldogs. And he was also on the varsity basketball team, so he was mentioned all the time in the local newspaper. Queese had even gotten a scholarship to play with the Fayetteville College football team, the Broncos. But because of COVID, there was no season during his freshman year, so he had really been looking forward to getting on the field. You know, his ultimate dream was to actually play in the NFL, and so he really wanted to make enough money that he could take care of his mom and his grandma, who had raised him, his brother, and his sister on their own. He even joked with Tanisha about buying a huge mansion and, like, giving her and Jana a whole wing to themselves so they could all live together, but he could still have his privacy. But police learned that he was more than just a great athlete. Everyone they interviewed described him as caring and generous, dedicated, smart, thoughtful, always with a huge smile on his face.

Like, he was the type of person that others looked up to, and he adored his siblings and nephew, and he actually loved to make people laugh. So the thing is, he didn't have any enemies. He was the heart of St. Paul's. Everybody that we actually talked to has always talked highly of him. Everybody has good things to say about him. So it becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly, that Queese was not the intended target of the shooting. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was just taken away for no reason whatsoever. He didn't do anything to anyone. He didn't bother anyone. So then who was the intended target?

Well, the most obvious choice is the person who lives in the trailer that they were in. And at the time of the shooting, that's Queese's friend, the guy that we're calling William. As it turns out, just a few days before, William had gotten arrested. The Robisonian reported that William and another man were accused of shooting at a car as it was leaving a gas station. According to an incident report that we got through a public records request, police responded to the gas station for a shot's fired call, and they reviewed surveillance footage and saw a black man wearing a white shirt and blue jeans firing a handgun at the car. And then he and three other guys that he was with got into another car and left.

Ultimately, police found five 9-millimeter casings in front of a gas pump. Now, Queese and William had played football together in high school, so they hung out a lot, which worried Tanisha. So after the arrest, she gave her son a warning. I say, you know, there's going to be a retaliation. Don't go to that house. But he kind of got upset with me because I guess he thought I was first telling him not to go. But I won't tell him not to go. I was just telling him not to go at that time. So, Queese just thought she was being an overprotective mom. Right. And of course, the moment Tanisha is able to collect her thoughts for a second in that hospital waiting room,

she realizes that the two shootings have to be linked. So when detectives come to her home later that morning, right after she gets back from the hospital, she tells them about it. And had police already made that connection? Well, it seems like police had already talked to William by this point. I mean, two different people told us that William went to the hospital while everything was going on, and that investigators spoke with him there. But I don't know exactly, like, what conversation they had. I don't know if they knew about the shooting. I don't know if William told them about the shooting,

or if they just knew that, like, it was his place that got shut up and that's where Queese was. Now, obviously, we asked the detectives about that conversation, but they're not wanting to say anything. This is an open case, and investigators are being pretty tight-lipped at this point. In fact, they didn't mention William by name at all when Nina spoke with them. And that's the reason that we're not naming him in this episode, because he's never been publicly mentioned in any context related to Queese's case. Police won't even say that he was still living in the trailer at the time of the shooting, even though everyone else we spoke with said he was.

But police did say to us that they do believe that the two shootings, the one at the gas station and the one where Queese was shot, are connected. It wasn't related to that incident based on investigation. We think it was. Now, Tanisha does manage to learn more that very day, because after detectives leave, Robison County Sheriff Bernice Wilkins stops by. He said that they did find out it was two shooters. They said it was two, because it was two different guns. Tanisha says that the sheriff tells her that the shooters were outside the trailer

and fired 20 rounds into it. She also finds out that Queese's car, which was still parked over at William's house, had been hit by gunfire. It was two cars in the driveway, only my son's car got shot. But even stranger than the car is the fact that Queese's things ended up going missing from the trailer. You see, a few of Queese's belongings were over at William's house, because he had planned to stay at his sister's that night. So he brought like a book bag plus his TV and Xbox so that he could play video games. But Tanisha says that later in the day after police finished up at the trailer,

Queese's friends go to get his stuff. But when they check, it looks like the place had been ransacked and Queese's things are all gone. I mean, maybe police took his stuff as evidence? Well, Tanisha actually calls them to ask that as soon as his friends let her know this and they tell her that they didn't take that stuff. Now, over the next couple of days, as Tanisha tries to process every parent's worst nightmare and plan for a funeral for her son, police learn more about what happened in the trailer. Investigators collect surveillance footage also from homes, schools, businesses,

and churches in the area of the mobile park. We went in every direction to determine which way the suspect might have traveled. So we went different directions, not just one location. They also interview more people trying to nail down a clear timeline of the night from witnesses who were in the trailer. Now, Nina spoke to one of the guys who actually survived the shooting, who asked that we don't use his real name because of safety concerns. So we're going to call him Jason. Jason says that police came to speak with him a couple of days after the incident.

They wanted to know everything he remembered from that night. Start to finish. Jason told us that he and Queese's cousin, along with two other young women, went to William's house late that Wednesday night, like around 11 p.m. William wasn't there, but Queese was, along with another friend of theirs. Wait, William wasn't at his own house? So, Tanisha says that William's mom had actually come to pick him up at some point on Wednesday after he was released from jail for that gas station shooting charge.

So by the time that Jason and the women get to the trailer that night, he's not there anymore. I guess my question is, why were they all at his house when he wasn't even there? Well, William lived there on his own. And I mean, I don't know. You remember how it was when that first friend gets their place of their own? It kind of becomes a group hangout for everyone. Oh, yeah. Jason says that William had no issue with people coming over,

and his place kind of became that hangout place for them, and it was kind of like an open door policy. Anyway, Jason went to the store with Queese's cousin, and then gave the other two women rides home before going back to the trailer. And in those early morning hours on Thursday, there were four of them inside. So it was Queese, his cousin, their other friend, and Jason. And Jason says that they were hanging out in this little room at the back of the trailer, just sitting on a couch, listening to music, talking the usual,

when all of a sudden it was like the world exploded. Jason remembers just seeing bullets flying through the trailer's exterior wall. Now, this is a pretty small, single-wide trailer, and if you picture basically like a rectangle, the bullets were coming through one of the longer sides, and the sound he said was deafening. He told us, quote, we all just trying to get down on the ground,

but the room is only but so big. So we are all scattering, trying to lay down on the floor. At the moment, I just, I was just thinking that I'm going to die here, end quote. Jason thinks that the gunfire lasted no more than 15 seconds, but it felt like forever. And after the shooting stopped, they were honestly scared to get up. I mean, they didn't know what was going on. Jason was afraid that whoever was out there was going to come into the trailer

and just kill them all. But then they realized Queese had been shot. He had been sitting closest to the trailer wall that was hit by bullets, and after the shooting, he was on the floor sitting kind of upright, slumped back against the couch and wall. And was he still alive at that point? Well, Jason says that his eyes were open and honestly looked like he was trying to say something, but he couldn't.

And the need to get him help outweighed the fear of what might still be outside. So that's when they made that call to 911 that you heard at the beginning of this episode, and they frantically reached out to other people too. And eventually, I mean, we know when the ambulance didn't arrive, they picked Queese up, put him in his cousin's car, and just drove to the hospital. So you mentioned how loud it was. Did any of William's neighbors call 911?

I mean, I guess I don't know how big the trailer park is, but I kind of have to imagine that someone heard what was going on. Yeah, I mean, so you're right. It's not a very big trailer park. I mean, I looked it up on Google Earth, and it looks like there are maybe a dozen mobile homes clustered around this sort of L-shaped makeshift stretch of road. And according to the dispatch report,

it looks like at least one other person in the area did call 911 and said that people were screaming and that someone got shot. And what about anything before the shooting? Like, did any of the neighbors hear a car pulling up or any sort of commotion? Well, Lieutenant Dimmery says police did speak with other residents there, but because there are potential safety concerns, they aren't sharing any information about those interviews yet.

Although I'm glad you brought up cars, because within a few days of Queese getting killed, police tell Tenisha that they did notice two suspicious cars on the footage from the different surveillance cameras that they were able to collect. The cars were apparently traveling close together on North Alfred Road, and they were like the only cars out around that time. But, of course, they can't tell, like,

what the license plate numbers are because of the angle of the cameras. Now, Jason says that he probably wouldn't have heard any cars pulling in before the shooting, because remember, they're like playing music on the TV. It was super loud. Here's the thing, after the shooting, he doesn't remember hearing music anymore. He says it was totally silent,

and I don't know if that's because the TV was hit by gunfire or what, but the interesting thing is, he didn't hear any cars after the shooting, like no one driving off or anything like that. I mean, he also could have just been in shock from what had happened, seeing his friend get shot. I mean, there's a lot going on right now. That's true, but of note,

there are actually some woods behind the trailer park, and, you know, if he really didn't hear any motors, he thinks that whoever did it might have been on foot and took off that way. Now, we actually asked police about the cars they mentioned to Tanisha, but they wouldn't say if the two cars were involved. And another thing that really stuck out to us is they also said they can't even confirm

that there were four people inside of the trailer at the time of the shooting. We would say that they was at the scene. We're not going to say that they were in the trailer. We would say that they were at the scene. We can determine that. We do know the location of some, but this entire case is based on people not coming for us

and people not telling the complete truth, even people that was there. That seems like a weird statement. Yeah, I thought so too. I mean, Jason says that he told police everything he remembers, and when he spoke with us, his story was consistent, and he was able to tell us little details, like even where he was sitting, where everyone else was sitting,

what Queese was wearing, how heavy he felt when they picked him up, things like that. Now, we don't really know anything about the other witness interviews, but there is a little scrap of information in the medical examiner's investigation report. I mean, literally one sentence about another witness's statement, and Britt, I'm going to have you read this for us. Sure, it says, quote, family member states

she heard shots and found deceased laying on ground, unresponsive, end quote. Now, I think it's safe to assume that the family member is his cousin because she was apparently the only female there, but I don't know if we can draw any strong conclusions from this because it's not a verbatim quote from her, and it's not clear if she said that to a detective

who then relayed it to the Emmy investigator or if she said it directly to the Emmy investigator, or if any inferences were made by anyone before it got put on paper. But even that one sentence narrative sounds pretty different than what Tenetia says she had been told by the other two people who were in there, and what Jason told us, like in terms of the position Queese was in.

Remember, he said that he was kind of like sitting upright, slumped back, versus this statement says he's laying down after he'd been shot. Yeah, and to me at least, the statement sounds kind of removed from the situation. Like, I'm having trouble figuring out how to say it, but almost like the way you would describe something that happened in another room

or that someone else told you, something like that. No, I know what you mean, and it sounds odd to me too, but again, without more context, I just don't know how much weight to actually give it. Now, the report also says that the reason for the shooting is unknown. There are no suspects, and they're not sure what type of gun was used. But again, this is just the medical examiner's investigative report,

so I'm not sure if this stuff is also true for police or if it's just light on details because they know it's a public record and they don't want too much out yet or what. And speaking of the medical examiner, Queese's autopsy is conducted on Monday, August 2nd. According to the autopsy report, he was shot twice in the right side of his chest.

There's an exit wound for one of the shots, and the other shot has no exit wound, so the bullet pierced his right lung and heart, and the fragment is recovered from his lung. Now, a couple of days later, on Wednesday, August 4th, the Sheriff's Department asks crime stoppers to offer a $3,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the murder.

But by the next day, the reward is up to $8,000 thanks to an anonymous donation from a local businessman. And Sheriff Wilkins says it's just one example of their community coming together in the aftermath of a cowardly criminal act. But that community is also confused and scared. That same day, the reward is increased. August 5th, St. Paul's announces a new coalition

called Stop the Violence. According to Jessica Horne's reporting for the Robisonian, the mayor said that residents wanted to do something about the recent shootings in the area, especially Queese's, and when they brought their concerns to the police chief, the coalition was the result. Now, on Friday, August 6th, everyone gets together

on the football field at St. Paul's High School to release balloons in Queese's memory. As hundreds of balloons float up into the sky, black and red, his favorite colors, Tanisha looks at all of the people there and thinks of the impact her son managed to make in just 19 years. But she also can't help but wonder

if someone on that field knows more than they're willing to admit. I mean, everyone is talking about the shooting. It's hard separating fact from fiction and even harder to believe that no one in their small town knows who killed her son. People know who did what around there. If a pen dropped, you were here.

Queese is laid to rest the next day, Sunday, and his funeral draws a massive crowd. The church that I had it at held 500 people, and we still have people standing up and outside. As his grief-stricken family tries to settle into their new normal, the rumor mill keeps churning. Tanisha constantly hears from people

who want to tell her about things that they've heard, but lots of them don't want to go to police. I don't know if they're scared that somebody gonna do something to them or they just not telling. Now, she passes their information along to detectives, but the whole thing is frustrating to everyone who wants this case solved.

Telling somebody, a family member, well, this is what happened, ain't gonna be a fate if any case. You need to sit down with us law enforcement officers and tell us this is what happened, this is how I know. Here's there's no good in the court file. We got a good idea who was responsible, but the community's not willing to step up.

Okay, so if the trailer shooting was revenge for the gas station shooting, do we know why the gas station shooting happened in the first place? So there was nothing about motive in the incident report that we got. We got a comment on a Facebook post that police made about this incident.

A woman who refers to William as her brother wrote that he was just trying to protect himself and the people that he was with. And it doesn't look like William had gotten in any legal trouble before that, at least not as far as we can tell. Actually, he was supposed to go off to college that fall and he had gotten a scholarship to play football,

but Tunisia says that he lost that scholarship after the arrest. Now, the guy that William was arrested with, a local man in his mid-twenties, he is a different story. In fact, according to the Robisonian, the gas station shooting was the second time that he had gotten arrested that month.

And all this while he was out on bail awaiting trial for a murder that he was charged with a few years ago. What? Yeah, and this could be really important because if the gas station shooting had more to do with him than with William, then maybe the key to finding Cleese's killer or killers

is in that guy's history. Lieutenant Dimmery says police are keeping an open mind and making sure to check out every potential angle. If we focus on one thing, we'll become closed-minded and focus on that. That, as an investigator, we'll hand her an investigation. Hold up. Why was that other guy on bail

when he was facing a murder charge? Well, according to Braley Dodson's reporting for WBTW News 13, setting bond, I guess, comes down to two factors. Basically, is the defendant going to show up to court? And are they a danger to the community? If someone has, like, recent pending charges or convictions, prosecutors can argue that they're a danger,

but it's literally, like, a case-by-case thing. Anyway, Tanisha does speak with William about this whole situation. He came over here and we was talking, and he got up and started crying, and he went out the door, and I went out the door behind him, and he said, we were set up.

He said, it was a set up. And I looked at him, I was like, what you mean? It was a set up. And he said, if you ever find out, it's going to break your heart. That's the last thing he ever said to me. I said, my heart already broke. Can't nothing break my heart, no words. What does he mean by that?

Tanisha says that she's been trying to figure that out for months now. She also tells police about the conversation. But as you can imagine, all of the layers of mystery and the unanswered questions make it even more difficult for Queese's family and friends. And as the days and then weeks and then months pass by, they wait anxiously for a break in the case,

something that will lead them to an arrest. They make sure that Queese's story stays in the public eye. They put justice for Queese yard signs around town. They even create social media pages and set up a GoFundMe, which we have linked to on our blog post and in our show notes, so they can raise money to put up billboards

and increase the reward. And they also find ways to honor his life. During high school football games, not just St. Paul's, but their rivals too, players carry a Jersey out on the field with his Bulldogs number on it, number 32. And there's a sad legacy behind that Jersey number, actually. Queese chose it because one of his closest friends,

a guy named Jamelle Leonard, had worn it when he played for the team. But Jamelle was shot and killed in 2016. And according to Tonya Brown's reporting for ABC 15 News, that shooting took place also on North Alfred Road. That's just heartbreaking, but it seems kind of unbelievable that both these shootings happened on the same road.

Well, it's probably because Robison County has the highest violent crime rate in North Carolina based on stats from the State Bureau of Investigation. I mean, as a matter of fact, not even a month after Queese was killed, another guy was shot to death while he was driving, again, on that same road. Now, police did announce two arrests in that case,

and to my knowledge, they aren't connected. But of course, that's no comfort to the people in the community. And there definitely seems to be some frustration among residents. Some don't think that the Robison Sheriff's Office has made Queese's case a priority. And Tanisha wants them to be more active, not just with his case, but other unsolved homicides, too. There is plenty of murders around here.

Robison County has not been solved. And I don't feel like they're pushing it like they should. Not only my son, other people, kids, you got murders walking around here. If they do it one time, they'll do it again. Major McClain says that every unsolved case is a priority to them, and that the Robison Sheriff's homicide clearance rate is over 80%, which is higher than the national rate.

We don't everything we can. We need help. We need help from the citizens who know information to step up and tell the truth. Police say that there's still working leads that come in, but back on July 29th, seeing all of those people at the hospital, they couldn't imagine that Queese's case would still be unsolved today. I honestly felt like this case would be solved in a matter of days

because of the love that people had for him. I just wish that love would transcend into somebody telling the truth. Tell us what happened. This case is very solvable, but people have to go forward. People have to be truthful. People who are just friends need to be friends and tell the truth. Tanisha just wants to see her son's killer or killers in prison. All I got to do is come forward.

We'll put this information in the show notes, but if you have any information that could help, please think of this family and contact Crime Stoppers at 910-865-8477. Callers can remain anonymous. You can also call the Robeson County Sheriff's Office at 910-671-3170 or 910-671-3100. To see photos, documents, and sources for this episode, visit our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.

And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio check production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?