A Jacket to Die For?

According to people in the neighborhood, the dispute was common knowledge, the suspected shooter familiar. Police have an arrest warrant out for 32-year-old Donnell Longus on a charge of second-degree murder. Longus is a relative of the young man involved in the dispute with Lee Marshall. That young man, a teenager who attended Spingarn High School, was described by people in the neighborhood as a capable "booster" who trafficked in hip stolen goods -- coats, pro basketball jerseys, whatever the black market demanded. According to friends and acquaintances of Marshall's, Lee placed an order for a jacket but the young thief accepted another offer and never delivered the promised jacket. It is unclear whether any money ever changed hands, but Marshall apparently was upset enough about his deal falling through that he decided to settle the matter himself.

A sign that something bad was brewing came to Joann Marshall by way of a phone call two days before her son was killed. A relative of the booster told her Lee had a jacket that didn't belong to him. The man was upset and sounded threatening, but before Joann Marshall could make any sense of it, Lee entered the apartment, grabbed the phone and quickly ended the conversation. She fussed at her son about the call. "Lee, don't bring nothing to my door." But Lee told his mama not to worry.

The call now haunts Joann Marshall, drives her into that dark tunnel of hindsight. "If I could have saved my child, I would have paid for it," she says of the North Face jacket. She wonders why the adult who phoned her didn't phone back. He knew her number, she didn't know his. They could have met, sorted everything out. "Evidently he knew more than I knew." She had been to parents' homes before to resolve feuds.

Now, she can't drop off her rent money or even mail a letter without being reminded of her loss. The mailbox, the rental office, they're on the same corner where Lee fell after being shot. On that corner, fastened to a traffic sign, is a makeshift memorial that Joann Marshall tidies from time to time: teddy bears, a gray New Balance cap, candles, roses and an empty bottle of Remy Martin 1738 Royal.

"I can't have any closure," she says. "I don't know who I'm walking past. Could I be walking past who's done this to my child? . . . You're in so much pain and so much hurt. You have so much anger and so much hostility, you feel like you're dying your ownself."

And then you read one of your 13-year-old daughter Tequilla's nightly letters to her slain brother:

"Lee when I think about you I cry or I say to myself why is my brother is gone. . . . I couldn't even . . . good bye because they killed my brother so fast."

Life Goes On

Clad in all black, Lee Marshall had an open-casket funeral. The line for one final look, a touch, a kiss, stretched outside the door at Free Gospel Deliverance Temple in the Coral Hills section of Prince George's. Marshall's 3-year-old daughter, Leaja, was there with her mom, Tamika Coleman, Lee's ex-girlfriend, looking confused. She would later tell her grandmother Joann: "I miss my daddy. He's in Heaven."

At the funeral, grown men gave up all their tears. Lee's brothers draped themselves over the body, heads on their brother's chest, unable to let him go. The wails never seemed to stop. Chris, the feisty brother, was there. He's 16 with a 10-month-old son and dreams of becoming a lawyer. Delante, now 19, the soft-spoken brother, was there, too. He went on to graduate from high school this year and has prospects of playing college basketball. Shannon, 21, the brother angriest over Lee's death, was also there, just holding on. Two other brothers, Stanley and Daniel, weren't there. They are serving time in prison.

As for Lee's mother, just keeping her family together has been a struggle. Joann Marshall, 47, has a frayed-around-the-edges beauty. Her hair changes from red streaked to braided to pixie cut to blond, but her melancholy seems constant. She dropped out of Cardozo High in the 10th grade and overcame drug addiction. She had 10 children, including Lee, 21 grandchildren and no career. Public assistance, part-time babysitting work and good budgeting, she maintains, got her to this point. "I'm not going to say I was the best mom in the world," she says. "The only thing I can say is that as a mother I tried to bring them up right."

She gave her children chores -- making beds, taking out trash, washing dishes. She tried family fish fries to keep them home, she tried curfews to keep them safe. Sometimes she'd go outside and actually pull her kids off corners. "But the streets suck our kids in," she laments. "No child is in your eye 24 hours. I'm doing what I can as a mother to save what I have left."

After Lee's burial at Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Northeast, after the doves flew and the balloons disappeared into the sky, Lee's homies returned to Brookland Manor and paid homage in their own way.