A Jacket to Die For?

Then Joann Marshall bolted. Out the door, down the steps, into the chilly air. She started running and then quit, halted by heartache. A commotion was building at the corner of 14th and Saratoga, a block away, yet she couldn't move. Awful memories filled her head: Her oldest son, Stanley, had been shot four separate times and dodged death. The "Teflon Don," they nicknamed him on the streets. Another of her six sons, Shannon, had been shot once and survived.

Rushing to the aid of a bleeding son was agonizingly familiar to Joann Marshall, but this time she just couldn't make it down that street. Delante did. He found his brother lying on the pavement, dressed in the gray work uniform that meant so much to him. "I was holding him. 'Just keep breathing. Everything gonna be all right. Just keep breathing.' "

Patricia McDonald, director of maintenance for Brookland Manor, was one of the first to reach Lee Marshall. She was in the rental office, at the corner of 14th and Saratoga, when someone shouted that a maintenance man had been shot. "There was a lot of blood," McDonald remembers, "so the only thing I did was pray for him because that's all I knew how to do. I do know how to do that."

McDonald has a 22-year-old son of her own. Lee was like another. "Hang in there," she told him. Lee did not speak. He was on his stomach, looking "like he was trying to get up," says McDonald. Her voice cracks as she recounts the story. "Broad daylight, 10:30 in the morning. It's unreal." McDonald was about to promote Lee from trainee to full-fledged maintenance technician. "He was a very handsome young man," she says, "and I just remember him lying in that cold street."

When the paramedics arrived, they cut off Lee's shirt. That's when Marshall's father, who had raced to the scene minutes earlier, saw the three bullet holes. "I knew he ain't have no shot," says Stanley Tate. No shot at surviving.

Tate rode in the ambulance with his son, hoping, praying, thinking. Lee-Lee, as his family called him, was 5 feet 9, 150 pounds, with braids that draped to his shoulders. He had a soft smile, the kind where you don't show your teeth. The camera was almost always his friend. It captured his warm side, his gentle side. But he also had a hard side. His résumé included charges of drug dealing and possession, scrapes at nightclubs and four months in jail for violating his probation on a firearms offense. He could be stubborn and intemperate. But he was struggling to become something better.

At 11:15 a.m., Lee Antonio Marshall was pronounced dead at Washington Hospital Center.

"I be thinking about him all the time," says Tate, 52, who has worked at construction sites, at RFK Stadium, at a center for the aging, wherever work can be found. "It's a lot of them out here dying over an argument -- $5, $50, a girl." Tate shakes his head. "I tell you what, if my son had talked to me, I probably could have saved him."

No Closure

Lee Marshall's killing was a brief item inside the Metro section of The Washington Post. His death occurred as D.C. authorities were about to report what for them was a major victory: the fewest homicides in a year -- 198 -- since 1986. Marshall's life had none of the biographical details -- pending college scholarship, service in the armed forces, well-known family name -- that might ordinarily make his murder the subject of widespread sympathy and attention. His was not one of those random, innocent-victim deaths that generate community outrage, like last year's slaying of 8-year-old Chelsea Cromartie, felled by an errant bullet that pierced a window as she watched TV. No, Marshall's killing was more typical of the score-settling homicides that are barely noticed in the nation's capital.

"That's one of the most debilitating things in our city -- the mindset that says certain lives are expendable," says David Bowers, founder of No Murders DC, a volunteer group dedicated to ending homicide in the city. "Until all life is valuable, no life is protected."

Marshall was gunned down because of a beef over a stolen $349 jacket. It was not just any jacket but a Steep Tech mountain-climbing jacket from The North Face company, a hot symbol of urban cool.

"The North Face was the focal point of it," says Lt. Lamar Greene of the D.C. police violent crimes branch, his tone official. "Marshall made a transaction for the coat. He doesn't get the coat, so Marshall takes the coat. The guy gets his crew and that's what led to the shooting."