A death overshadowed by police-brutality uproar

Three young men shot; three others beaten by Philadelphia police; the scene replayed on national television; the Rev. Al Sharpton in town; four police officers fired.

But for Sheila Williams, the mother of Andrew Coach, whose May 4 killing started this chain of events, there's fear that her son has been forgotten.

"My son's in the middle of all of this," Williams said, "and he's the one who's gone. No one should have been wounded, and no one should have been beaten, but there's a death at the root of this that should not be pushed aside."

In Williams' Feltonville neighborhood, where she has lived for 20 years and where her son was killed, no one seems to know anything, she said, and there have been no arrests.

And her anger and grief have been overshadowed by a question she has repeatedly been asked and cannot answer: What time was it when three of Coach's friends - the ones who eventually were beaten by police - left her house the night after he was killed?

"The only time I remember is 9:51, the time I lost my son," she said. That was the time on Sunday that doctors pronounced Coach dead.

About an hour before, Williams and her husband, Steven, had been watching television when they heard a knock at the door. Neighborhood youngsters had come to tell them that Coach had been shot. By the time the couple had run around the corner to the scene, police had taken Coach to the hospital.

Coach, 20, the oldest of the Williamses' blended family of five children, was a short young man - just 5-foot-2 - thin and handsome, his parents said, with an easy smile.

According to court records, he spent a night in jail three days before his slaying for allegedly having a small amount - less than half a gram - of crack cocaine.

Coach had been shot in the stomach - over a car, his parents said. They'd heard he had borrowed it without permission.

Sitting on the living room sofa with her husband, their daughter preparing for her senior prom, Sheila Williams remembered how earlier that day Coach asked to borrow her car to visit his grandmother. Sheila Williams, who sells cars for a Northeast Philadelphia dealership, told him no. He had only an expired learner's permit.

"They could've had my car," she said of her son's killers. "I would have bought them a car. He didn't deserve to die like that."

Head bowed, hands clasped, Steven Williams said, "I just want to know why. You don't have no right to take anyone's life."

"Over a car," his wife added.

The Williamses describe their son as a young father who loved his two daughters, ages 2 and 3.

"He loved to play sports," said Steven Williams, in Coach's life since age 5. "He was gifted. He could swim. He could play football and basketball."

The last time Steven Williams saw his stepson, he was standing in the front door grinning after his stepfather relented and gave him $5 to buy some loose cigarettes.

"He never brought trouble to his door," his mother added. "He never disrespected people. He was very well loved."

Sheila Williams noted that more than 300 people attended her son's funeral. But she admitted he could be "hardheaded." He started cutting up at 16, she said, spending more time out of school than in.

"He was more of a follower," she said. "He wasn't a leader of his own. He wanted people to like him."

To deal with her son's truancy, Sheila Williams sent him to Glen Mills, a disciplinary school, for about 18 months. When he came home last year, he drifted between his mother's and his grandmother's homes. He talked of going back to school and getting his driver's license. His stepfather was trying to get him a job at the post office where he worked.

The day after Coach was killed, family and friends filled the Williamses' home, including three of his friends: Dwayne Dyches, 24, Brian Hall, 23, and Pete Hopkins, 19.

Around 10 that night, during a nearby drug surveillance, officers said they witnessed a shooting that wounded three young men.

Police at the time were also searching for a suspect in the shooting of Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, who had been killed two days before.

One of the assailants ran away, police said, while the other three got back into a car and took off.

As a Fox29 news helicopter hovered overhead, police stopped a car and pulled out Dyches, Hall and Hopkins. Videos showed police kicking and beating the three men.

The trio have been charged with attempted murder in the shooting of the three others, which police believe may have been retribution for Coach's killing.

Dyches, Hall and Hopkins say they are innocent of any shootings. Sheila Williams believes they were at her home at the time, but, not knowing when they left, can't prove it.

For the grieving couple, waiting for justice in their son's death has been gut-wrenching.

"It feels like he's taken a backseat," said Steven Williams. "We're not hearing anything. We're just waiting."

Police have leads, but no suspects, the couple said.

Feeling the coldness of a formerly close-knit community, the family plans to move.

"It's too close to home," said Sheila Williams. The teddy bear memorial for Coach is piled up just over a block away.

"I'm passing it every time I come home from work," her husband said. "I see his body laying there."

"We're not going to have any peace," Sheila Williams said. "It's right there in your face every moment . . . that someone could take his life like that."