Ralph Coleman Murdered His Family. Did He Deserve to be Set Free?

K
imberly felt the gunpowder burn her face and neck. She fell to the ground and laid still in the dark, playing dead. 

The 13-year-old and her nine-year-old brother, Kevin, had been sitting on their beds upstairs with the radio on at the townhouse in Sacramento’s River Gardens neighborhood. It was past 10:30 on a late winter night in 1978, and their cousin Jeannie, 17, had come up to their room to hear about their day. Jeannie had moved in not too long before and was set to start college in the fall. Kevin was a smart kid who loved baseball and trains. Kimberly and Kevin’s mother and father had been downstairs, at the kitchen table, which had a mess of bills spread upon it. 

Earlier that evening, Kimberly had heard her parents arguing about a debt that may or may not have been paid. Her mother was tall and beautiful and sensitive; she loved styling hair and painting nails, which didn’t yet interest the tomboy Kimberly. Her father was an outdoorsman and coached her baseball team. People said she looked most like him. He had a Bronze Star from his service in Vietnam and had been a deacon at the church back in Ohio, but he’d started to change these past few years. It’d been stormy in the house for a while, but this fight hadn’t felt different from usual.

Around 11:30 p.m., Kimberly heard her father walk upstairs and then back down again. A single shot rang out. He climbed the stairs again, in no rush, and she heard him say, “I don’t have to take this shit anymore.” The bedroom door flew open, and even in the dark, she could see he was holding a rifle. Without raising his voice, he said, “I’m sorry I have to do this.” Jeannie said, “No, Uncle Ralph, don’t.” He shot and killed Jeannie. Kimberly and Kevin hid under the bed. He flipped the bed up and shot and killed Kevin. He shot a third time, barely missing Kimberly. Then, she heard her father walk away.

It was a few minutes before Kimberly left the room. She went downstairs and saw her father on the phone, and her mother’s body sprawled on a chair by the kitchen table. Her mother had been shot in the head. Something made Kimberly go to her father and hug him. He pushed her away. “I’ve never seen my father like I saw him,” Kimberly tells me. “He was so hazed over. He was not there. He was not himself.” He handed her the phone. It was her and Jeannie’s Aunt Vertistine “Tina” Parks on the other line. She remembers Parks telling her in a calm voice, “Your father’s sick. Don’t bother him. Just try to go get help and leave quietly.” So, as her father walked back upstairs, Kimberly hurried to her neighbor’s home. After she’d left, he called the police and told them, “Send somebody here, please, it’s an emergency. I just killed my family.” They arrived and found her father, Ralph Coleman, on the couch in his living room, holding his head in his hands. 

MY MOTHER DIED THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 2018. She was 64 and had been fighting brain cancer for two years — first with chemo and radiation, and then later with whatever alternative medicines felt meaningful at the moment. During that last year, after stopping treatment, she began a race to tie up every loose end in her life. She made peace with friends. She prepped my father for life after her death. She started to say her goodbyes. 

One of the last loose ends she struggled to tie was to get Ralph Coleman, whose prostate cancer had returned, released so he could die a free man. He’d been her client for almost three decades, ever since her former employer the Prison Law Office took him on as the name plaintiff in a massive class action suit against the state of California. That was in 1990, and Coleman, 12 years into his sentence, was struggling to access mental health care for the post-traumatic stress disorder he developed after his decorated service in Vietnam. In 1995, a judge ruled that the California prisons weren’t doing enough to treat their mentally ill inmates. The court appointed a special master to monitor the California State Prisons to make sure they were working to provide adequate mental health care. For the rest of her career, first with the Prison Law Office and then at my father’s law firm, my mother also began to visit prisons around the state, becoming close with hundreds of inmates. Every day, she wrote and answered stacks of letters from them, serving as something between an alderman and a priest. She was told about everything from small inconveniences and petty grievances to suicidal ideations and inhumane treatment at the hands of the guards.

The case that bore Coleman’s name became my mother’s lifework; the class of prisoners with serious mental disorders was massive, which meant she had more than 30,000 clients at a time. Growing up, I’d hear about my parents’ work all the time, but the way they spoke of Coleman was different. He was just “Ralph” — something like my mother’s favorite cousin that I’d never met. If Coleman needed a transfer or a surgery or something from the commissary, she’d be his first call. I never knew the details of his crime. 

I’d often hear the arguments from my parents against the way that we incarcerate in California: the overcrowding, the lack of care, how rehabilitation is highlighted but not prioritized. When she talked of getting Coleman out, she’d be lawyerly, explaining that recidivism rates drop sharply after offenders turn 65 and how costly it is to house a lifer. But for my mother, there was something deeper driving her push for Coleman’s clemency. Until the very end, she believed a man who’d done one unforgivable thing and then made amends should serve his time and then grow old and die at home. She wanted Coleman free because he was her friend, yes, but also because he was a symbol of the rehabilitative model she’d spent her life defending. 

So when Gov. Jerry Brown had started letting lifers out before leaving office, my mother believed she had a real chance to free Coleman. Her cancer had spread by then — to the bile ducts and the liver — but she worked diligently to compile data, gather character witnesses about Coleman, and review records along with a team of lawyers. 

The application for clemency they filed in February 2018 included letters from a former warden at Pelican Bay State Prison, from a psychiatrist, and from the director of a veteran aid group who offered help with work, housing, and “the support and stability necessary for Mr. Coleman to make a successful transition to life in the Bay Area” if he were released. My mother’s law firm reached out to Coleman’s daughter, Kimberly, who also wrote a letter in support.

But Coleman wasn’t on Gov. Brown’s Christmas Eve 2018 clemency list. Two days later, on Dec. 26, my dad came into my room and told me my mom had gone quietly in her sleep.

About six months after her death, I wrote Coleman a letter. I’d been consumed by my grief until then, but I thought I’d found solid ground again. Perhaps it was still too soon. See, I felt I was on a quest of sorts. I’d tell this story. It’d come out, and the new governor, Gavin Newsom, would read it. He’d have to. And then he’d see what my mother saw: that Coleman was an old man now. No threat. He’d understand that we don’t gain a thing by keeping a sick septuagenarian locked up. He’d let him go. And then my mother’s final loose end would finally be tied. 

It wasn’t long before Coleman wrote back. We started having biweekly calls to talk about his life and my mother and what it was like to grieve behind bars.

Still, even in that slightly off-centered state, a part of me dreaded those calls. Coleman was soft-spoken and sweet, but he would ramble at times. And his mentions of the case and of my mom would bring her back in jagged 15-minute chunks. I never knew when they would come, but I’d race to my recorder because she’d never missed a call, so I couldn’t either. 

On one call, Coleman told me about his and my mother’s first meeting, and about how she yelled at the warden when his leg got infected after a surgery. On another, he said she’d sometimes say of his crime: “I wish your life was a movie, and we could edit that one hour out.” At one point, he told me how much he missed her. But grief was nothing new to him, he said. “I’ve been grieving for 40 years.”

About six months after we started talking, on our second-to-last call, I asked Coleman if he was comfortable with me reaching out to his daughter. He got quiet for a minute. The silence was broken by that automated message that plays on prison lines saying how much time you have left. Finally, after another breath, he explained that going back to 1978 was like picking a scab. He told me he’d put his family through enough. 

So, I dropped it. At least I tried to. The story wouldn’t make sense without Kimberly in it. It wasn’t my story to tell. 

Coleman was sick already when we started talking. In December 2024, he passed away. A few months later, my father spoke with Kimberly and told her about my calls with her dad. She reached out. She wanted the story told. I mentioned Coleman’s concern about putting her through it all again. “That’s his opinion and that’s fair. That’s a parent talking,” she told me. But it wasn’t picking a scab for her, because that part of her had healed, she said. She’d looked back to that night in 1978 for years and years. It was her only way through. “And if my story can help somebody else, then heck yeah, let’s do it.”

“IT WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT TO accept the way it played out if he had been a bad dad,” Kimberly tells me on the first call last spring. “But he wasn’t a bad dad. He was a great father.”

Now 60 and a grandmother, Kimberly sounds youthful on the phone. There’s a buoyancy that’s jarring, given the content of our conversations, but her Christian faith is such that she can interrogate the traumatic moments of her life with a certain distance. A faith like hers gives order to chaos; she knows it’s what kept her going this long.

She was raised in Youngstown, Ohio, where both Coleman and Kimberly’s mother, Shirley, had grown up. The two were high school sweethearts, but the relationship was difficult from the start — Coleman was Black and Shirley was white. “My grandfather was a racist. I mean, he just didn’t like Black people,” Kimberly says. “Back then in Youngstown, Blacks didn’t mess with Italians.” Despite Shirley’s parents’ concerns, she dated the track and football star until he joined the Marine Corps after graduation in 1962. Two years later, while he was on leave, they reconnected and she got pregnant with Kimberly; they married in 1964. Still, even after they had their second child, Kevin, the animus remained: Kimberly never remembers Coleman being invited inside his in-laws’ home.

Kimberly was a toddler when her father was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and returned from Vietnam in 1967. He’d been a sergeant and had received a Bronze Star for bravery. She remembers a childhood in Ohio where he served as a deacon at their church, and he “spent so much time with us kids”: fishing trips, camping, coaching the sports teams. “My dad loved us,” she said. “I don’t have no doubt about that, you know? I never, ever doubted that.” 

But as she grew older, it became harder and harder for Coleman to keep a job. Dr. Pablo Stewart, a psychiatrist and professor at University of California, San Francisco, explained in a declaration in support of Coleman’s clemency that the change that occurred around 1971: “In this period, he started to have some problems in his marriage and to struggle at work. He began to experience more severe classic symptoms of PTSD, including reexperiencing his Vietnam combat episodes in the form of nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive, uncontrollable recollections. He was having trouble sleeping and would wake up screaming from the nightmares of being back in Vietnam. He would get ‘triggered’ and become anxious when he saw violent things on television. When he was hunting, the smell of gunpowder would bring him back to Vietnam.”

Coleman began to believe that the family phone was tapped, that his coworkers were “playing tricks on” him, and that there was some mark from a former employer that was hurting his job prospects. He became paranoid about his marriage, as well. He started distrusting Shirley. Then, in 1974, his wife admitted to having an affair with the minister of their church. 

The next year, Coleman moved to California, eventually finding a job in Sacramento. Kimberly tells me Shirley and the kids moved across the country to join him. She remembers how hard it was for her mother to leave her family back in Ohio. “When we moved to California, she cried all the time,” she says. “I’m quite sure my mom probably needed some counseling herself, just going through all the drama. I never doubted that they loved each other, but I’m sure they didn’t think that they would have to withstand all this stuff.”

Coleman’s mental health continued to deteriorate. In a psych report prepared for the original 1978 trial, a doctor wrote: “In the course of the interviews he also alluded to other ‘harassments,’ such as people coming into his apartment when he was gone, putting fingerprints and handprints on the wall, and he never could find out who did it. He would ‘go to the car and find dead flowers laying on the floor.’” 

In 1977, Coleman moved out of the house to live in a trailer. Then, around Christmas, he moved back in. He and Shirley hoped to salvage the marriage. And his favorite sister’s niece was coming to stay with them as she prepared to start college. That was months before the murders. 

Kimberly was just a child and missed much of her father’s mental deterioration. But there were moments after their move to California when she could recognize that her father had begun to seem changed. He’d ask her to take an inventory of the house and would teach her military tactics in case an intruder entered their home. That’s how she knew to play dead, she explains, after he’d shot and missed her that night. “As I look back on it,” she says, “the paranoia was getting worse and worse and worse.” 

IN AUGUST, I FLY OUT TO COLUMBUS, Ohio, to spend the day with Kimberly. Her neighborhood on the western edge of the city was mainly farmland when she and her husband, Kevin, moved here in 2005, but now there are houses on every plot. I ring the doorbell and am greeted by an overexcited black Lab and Burnese mountain dog mix named Destiny and by Kimberly, who wears a loose striped dress, thick black-framed glasses, and large hoop earrings. We settle in her kitchen, which is crowded with piles of snacks and pots and pans and Tupperware. 

I ask Kimberly if she has any photos of her parents, and she roots around in the garage for a while, trying to locate an album. She can’t find it but goes upstairs and returns with some photographs she’d grabbed from her paternal grandmother’s home after she passed away.

She spreads them on the table and begins to introduce me to her father’s family: her grandmother Exia in all blue by a pier; her brother, Kevin, in his baseball uniform; her cousin Jeannie in her cap and gown; her aunt Tina and Jeannie’s mom, Barbara, and her dad’s brother, Billy. She finds some snapshots from Kevin’s birthday party: one of him opening gifts, another with Kimberly and six cousins crowded around him as he stares at his cake, and one of her dad holding Kevin and her mom, in black-frame glasses, holding Kimberly, who’s probably five or six years old. “I remember that. I do remember that, oddly enough. That’s crazy. I remember she made that cake.” Kimberly gets quiet for a moment, looking at the photo. “Yeah. Crazy. Like yesterday, you can remember that stuff.”

After the murders, Kimberly became a ward of the state until her family figured out who would take her in. She says her mother’s side never attempted to come get her, so eventually, she spent time with her Uncle Billy in Boston, and then her Aunt Tina, who was bedridden, back in Youngstown, before settling with her grandmother, who lived in a better school district. Kimberly graduated high school and then moved into the YWCA. Soon after, she got pregnant and, when she started showing, she had to move out.

Remarkably, her Aunt Barbara, Jeannie’s mother, told Kimberly she could stay with her until she could afford her own place. Barbara and Coleman had been so close before the killings that she’d given her son his middle name. They’d always loved to fish and play cards. Still, Barbara was a shell of herself in her grief, and Kimberly knew that her face — so much like her father’s — was a constant reminder of what Coleman had taken from her. “When I first got pregnant, she said she really felt led to help me, and so she did. She helped me get my first apartment, but she was struggling,” Kimberly says, shaking her head. “She never took anything out on me. She always told me it wasn’t my fault.” 

Barbara is the last of her father’s siblings still living, though her health has sharply declined in recent years. Kimberly was numb back when she moved in with her aunt, but as she’s gotten older, she’s become more and more moved that the woman who’d lost a daughter found it in her heart to take her in. Still, there was a weight in the home as her aunt tried to bear an impossible grief. “To have to watch and know — like, I sat from the perspective of, OK, my dad killed your daughter,” Kimberly remembers. “That was a lot sometimes, to have to watch her and just process that.”

Not long into our first call, Kimberly starts to tell me the story of the night after the killings. When her father was arrested, the police took her to a receiving home — a short-term care facility for kids waiting to be put into foster care or the custody of another family member. She was in shock, alone, and numb. At some point, a young girl sat beside her and asked, “What happened?” Kimberly told her about the shooting, and the girl listened quietly before saying, “That happened to me, but my dad ended up taking his own life, so I don’t have anybody.” Kimberly remembers it all as an out-of-body experience; she felt lucky, strange as that sounds. She knew then that, somehow, it could be worse. She says it was right around then when she decided “that, as a person, I wanted him to be OK.”

“I know it was God that intervened that night, because I talked to somebody, and I never saw that person again,” she says. She’s not sure the girl was real, but it doesn’t matter: She knows she was an angel. Kimberly’s voice still shakes, remembering it all. Her father had her when he was 20; she had her first son at the same age. “He had grandkids,” she says. “Great-grandkids.” I ask how she could find it in herself to forgive her father for what he’d done to her family and to her. Didn’t she ever wish he’d suffer for his crimes? “God immediately made it to where I would not experience hate in my heart, because if I carried that through my adulthood, it would have killed me.”

YEARS AGO, WHILE WORKING ON A feature about the post-Serial true-crime boom, a lawyer said to me, “Telling stories about the wrongfully accused is too easy. It’s much more important to tell stories about guilty men who’ve served their time and should be free.”

“Telling stories about the wrongfully accused is too easy. It’s much more important to tell stories about guilty men who’ve served their time and should be free.”

Coleman had entered confinement in 1978 with no criminal record save for the worst possible crime. He knew he was sick, acknowledged it, sought help, and created a pathway for thousands of others to access that mental health care as well. As his former warden put it, Coleman’s “institutional record of active participation in programs and his ability to remain discipline-free over the past 39 years (with the exception of one minor administrative infraction during his first year in prison) is nothing short of remarkable.”

“The reality is, most veterans do well in prison, because it’s a structured environment, and they’re used to a structured environment,” says Ron Self, a Marine Corps vet who served 23 years in California prisons. “You get preprogrammed for it, and frankly, know how to navigate it.” Self had spent 10 years in special ops; about five months after he was honorably discharged, he was arrested for attempted murder and sentenced to 32 years to life. During his two-plus decades behind bars, he spent much of his time leading veterans groups, including the one he founded behind bars: Veterans Healing Veterans from the Inside Out. 

Self began his military service more than a decade after Vietnam but says it was striking how, during his time inside, Vietnam veterans made up such a disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated community. A 2016 U.S. Department of Justice survey found that nearly 30,000 male combat veterans were incarcerated in state and federal prisons, and that, 40 years after the fall of Saigon, more than 40 percent of them had served in Vietnam. 

Though Self was unsurprised by Coleman’s ability to adapt to life inside, he stresses that the system Coleman was navigating decades ago was basically “urban combat.” 

“Back in the day, when he was at San Quentin,” Self says, “there were so many stabbings, it was good practice for the guys that were going overseas to be medics.”

And yet, Coleman spent more than four decades behind those bars trying to better himself. It’s hard to know what sparks a lifer — who, by law, would have to spend all his years in a maximum security prison regardless of behavior inside — to take college courses. But, a few hours into my visit to Columbus, Kimberly grabbed two large cardboard boxes of her father’s belongings that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had mailed her. The mess of papers — VA files, court documents, letters from lawyers, military commendations — were so haphazardly arranged that Kimberly had felt too overwhelmed to dive in before my visit. But as we flipped through dozens of documents, we found a report card from 1981. That year, Coleman attended four Sacramento State classes that were offered to inmates at Folsom Prison: The British Isles, Interpersonal Communication, American Governments, and Advanced Psychology Basic Processes. 

There was a writing pad, too, with essays, drafts of letters, and poetry. Kimberly was surprised to see it all; her father mainly asked about her life or mentioned small inconveniences during their weekly phone calls. I squinted to read one poem, written in a loopy cursive pencil stroke: 

“A small place of happyness; where do we find it. Deep below the surface of the mind we search for this precious gift. Seeking to tap it like a rich oil well. Seeking to loose the hopes and dreams that are inbeded deep below the surface. We work our fingers to the bone in search of this treasure. Some come close and others fall way short. Never knowing the taste of that place.”

I tell Kimberly that my mother believed her father should get out because she believed he’d done as much as anyone could to rehabilitate. I ask Kimberly what rehabilitation means to her. She’s quiet for a minute. “To me, that means to put something back together a different way,” she says. 

Though her father did the work he could do behind bars, Kimberly was always realistic about his chances of returning fully to the man he’d been before he did what he did. Still, after my mother reached out, Kimberly and her husband, Kevin, had a conversation and agreed that if Coleman had gotten clemency, he could move into their home. She says she’s always known that her father’s soul wasn’t “black” and that he was tormented by what he’d done. “But even if I really am remorseful and try to reverse the situation,” she says, “our society has a funny way of always dragging that in front of you, and so you’re constantly treading water.”

For Kimberly, it took getting out of Youngstown more than two decades after the murders to do more than tread water through her trauma. As long as she was surrounded by all the people and places from the years before her father’s descent, the persistent questions she couldn’t answer seemed to swirl. How could Coleman have done what he’d done? What was going through his mind that night? She knew the PTSD had caused it, but that knowledge was far from a salve. “I had got to a place where I just couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function,” she says. “I had a son early. So it was like, ‘I got to take care of this person, and I gotta get through life.’ And it was rough.”

In her late 20s, she took a mission trip with her church to Uganda for a women’s conference. At the end of one day, a local woman approached, embraced her tightly, and whispered something in Swahili into her ear again and again and again. “She wouldn’t let me go, and I just broke,” Kimberly tells me. “I cried for almost 45 minutes straight. She just pressed all the pain out of my life right at that moment.” Kimberly later learned the meaning of the phrase the woman was repeating: “Jesus loves you.” To her, it was clear what had happened. “God wrapped his arms around me and just held me,” Kimberly continues. “It was incredible. Incredible. And then I was able to run on a little further.”

AS I SPOKE ABOUT THIS STORY WITH friends and colleagues, many shrunk at the mention of Coleman’s crime. I’d started the reporting with the view of Coleman that my mother had imparted on me. But as a father now, reading the details of that night was painful. Even with all the extenuating circumstances, even with the conversations I’d had with Coleman and Kimberly, I felt an anger as I pored through the court documents. I’d hoped the story would be as simple as the one my mother had told: that a good man had broken with reality for a moment and done an inconceivable thing. But it was messier. 

And the more I read about the case, the harder it was for me to understand the faith my mother had that Coleman would be released. The murders themselves were gruesome, and they hadn’t come from nowhere. As his paranoia worsened, he’d become a difficult man to live with. He needed help he wasn’t offered, sure, but he’d been suspicious of Shirley for months. 

The police had found two letters that seemed to be written by Shirley that were presented during the trial. Later, the California Supreme Court deemed them to be hearsay and inadmissible, which eventually led to a retrial. The first, dated Sept. 7, 1976, was written to Coleman’s mother, and it was an apology for her infidelity. In it, Shirley wrote that things had become too “unbearable to live with. Ralph can’t and I surely can’t anymore. The children can’t either.” She explained that Coleman had “threatened to kill us all because of hurt, disappointment, etc.” The second letter, from six months before the murders, is addressed “TO WHOEVER SHOULD SEE THIS” and seemed written to be read by someone arriving at the scene of the crime. “Many times before he spoke of killing myself & the kids because it was my fault all this went on, plus he doesn’t want the kids ever going through life like he has …” She ends the letter, hauntingly, “But it’s all over now. Take care & find one who can make you gloriously happy — I thought I did for awhile. Maybe our parents were right — we could never make it. Maybe we just didn’t try hard enough.”

Robert T. Muller is a professor of psychology at Toronto’s York University and author of Trauma and the Avoidant Client. As I explain Coleman’s case to him, he tells me that with the understanding we have of PTSD today, there would’ve been many red flags to spot: paranoia, access to weapons, increasing social isolation, difficulty keeping employment, and, of course, his service in Vietnam. “One of the big things in the PTSD literature is the idea of betrayal trauma, the concept that when people feel betrayed by their country, the servicemen and servicewomen didn’t feel there was the kind of moral justification that other vets in other wars were able to find,” he explains. “‘I killed. I almost was killed. And now I come back and I don’t feel that there was a good reason for it, or I feel I was lied to by my country.’ That idea of being betrayed really, really stings. And there was something very unique about Vietnam in terms of that sense of betrayal.” Coleman, like so many other veterans of that war, returned home with a head full of horror and shame. Then, he began what should have been an identifiable descent that finally led to an unfathomable act.  

There had been comfort in the way I’d understood Coleman’s crime at first: a good man — a loving father and war hero — had had a flashback, snapped, did the unthinkable, and then returned, full of remorse and ready to serve his time and get better. But, Muller explains, that that’s not how psychosis works. There is always a descent. There are always signs. 

That night in 1978 was not the first moment that Coleman had been a danger to himself and others; it was just the time when everything went so horribly wrong. When Coleman told me of my mother saying to him that she wished his “life was a movie, and we could edit that one hour out,” I realized she held onto that framing, as well.

For her to truly hope that a governor would choose Coleman for clemency begs believing. Gov. Brown — knowing he was retiring from public office — would likely have been the only one to even consider it. But it never seemed possible.

Yet, the more I pondered it, the more insight I got into my mother’s mind at that late stage. She’d spent a life working to change the prison system from one that punishes to one that rehabilitates. Coleman was a symbol — perhaps the ultimate symbol — of time well served. More than that, he was a change agent for the mental health care my mother believed could change the future of tens of thousands of incarcerated men. His case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court; in 2011, the justices ruled that California had to reduce its overcrowded prison population in order to avoid cruel and unusual punishment. If Coleman’s 40 years behind bars, working to help other prisoners and himself, didn’t count for something, then what was the point of what she was doing? She’d never allowed herself to believe in lost souls; she needed to hold onto the idea that everyone could serve their time and come home.

There was a day back in July 2006 that I still remember. The California Department of Corrections made an announcement that they’d now be known as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). My mother shook her head, and she managed to laugh to keep from screaming. She’d spent decades fighting the CDCR to make California prison a place to rehabilitate rather than just punish. But a name change felt like little more than a branding exercise for her 30,000 clients. She could clearly see a world where Coleman deserved to meet his great-grandkids and to live his last days with his daughter, because she believed in rehabilitation like others believe in god. 

On our phone calls, there were many adjectives I’d use to describe Coleman: tired, mournful, bitter, wise. But what I never felt of the 78-year-old was that he was a threat. He was not still behind bars to protect the public’s safety. Instead, just like he was for my mother, he was there as a symbol: The state had to declare that some acts are beyond the pale.

In one call, I asked Coleman what clemency would mean to him. He knew that he didn’t have much time left. He must know it was a long shot that he’d ever be released. Why continue the fight to spend your last days outside of a prison cell? 

“It goes beyond words,” he told me. “The thing that I wish I could do is be able to talk to and visit with my grandsons and my great-grandson. My great-grandson, I’ve only spoken to momentarily over the phone. Nothing lengthy.

“So, beyond words — the joy,” he continued. “To be able to sit face to face with them.”

Coleman was 33 when he was arrested. Kimberly knew him three times as long as a prisoner than she did as a free man. So, I ask if there was a time when their relationship changed. No, she tells me, “he never stopped feeling like Dad.” 

He would give her his opinion if she asked for it. He was a good listener, and only once ever was stubborn with his parental advice. Kimberly told him she was going to move with her kids to Sacramento to be closer to him. “He was like, ‘There’s so many gangs out here, and I don’t want them ever to get involved in that,’” she remembers. “He was like, ‘I’m asking you not to do it.’” Multiple times through our conversations, Kimberly mentioned that she wished her kids had known her dad more. But she’s glad he kept them from California. Both her sons stayed out of trouble and still live close by still. Her grandkids are over all the time. 

There was one day, much later, that “really broke me in half,” she tells me, beginning to cry. “He did say he was really proud of me for just taking care of my kids, and he was just so happy that they were OK and that they became productive.” When Coleman died, he left all the money he’d managed to save to her sons.

MY MOTHER RAISED US JEWISH, but was never much interested in the prayers themselves. She preferred a service all in Hebrew, because it allowed her to zone out and enter a meditative state. She was superstitious and moral, but it wasn’t until the very end that I heard her talk of god. To cope — or perhaps through revelation — she became convinced of an afterlife. She wrote a strange little book, which she photocopied and bound for me and my two brothers called The Soul Lives Forever. In it, she told a quick pocket history of her life and her illness, and then explained her beliefs on what happens after her death. At the end, she wrote, “Our souls are influenced by those souls we bumped up against as we grew and those who bumped against us. We will continue to feel these connections the rest of our body’s life and beyond.” 

Kimberly lived a life of much more present faith. But it was later — after all the trauma — that she became a person who lived in a world with an ever and extremely present god. Her god was right there in all her stories: in the receiving home and in Africa and in her life every day since. Her faith would have been foreign to my mom for most of her life. But as her death approached, my mom seemed to enter that same spiritual space.

Not long before I head out to the airport, Kimberly grabs one more box the CDCR had sent her. It’s a heavy, black metal square with a white label that reads, “This Package Contains The Cremated Remains Of: Ralph Terry Coleman.”

It had arrived on her doorstep in February, a few days before the two large cardboard boxes with all the items from her father’s cell. She hasn’t opened it yet — she doesn’t really know what it’ll do to her when she does. But she remembers the feeling of looking at the steel square and the two shipping boxes and thinking how strange it was for her father and his whole life to be wrapped up and sent to her through the mail.

So much of what filled Coleman’s cell was about the civil rights class action suit — his namesake — where he met my mother. As we flipped through letters and legal documents and more, Kimberly tells me she never knew the magnitude of the case until my dad reached out after Coleman’s death. Looking back, she knows her father worked so hard on it while incarcerated because he wanted his legacy to be something besides the worst thing he ever did.

Kimberly starts to shake her head and grin as she tells me that her sons now love to fish just as much as their grandfather had. She never pushed it on them; she didn’t have the time while working two jobs when they were young. But fishing just found them and became their place of calm, just like it had been for her dad. “He had so much stress in his life,” she says. “I think the lake was a place where he just let all that go.”

She only ever knew her father after he’d returned from the war that scarred him, but she knows he was most peaceful and most joyful when he was outside. So, she’s planning to head out to Lake Erie this summer to say a few words and scatter his ashes. It’ll be odd, though, she knows, because the happy moments she’s sharing are about a man they barely knew. 

But to be outside, by the water, telling stories to his two grandsons and four great-grandchildren feels like the way to send him off. He’d been a great father, and then a murderer, and then he became her dad again. The worst night imaginable had shaped everything that came next, but Kimberly cherishes most of everything that’s in her life today. His soul had bumped against her soul, and hers against those of her kids and grandkids. “Because my grandkids are an extension of my kids, and my kids are an extension of me,” she says, “and, you know, of my dad, too.”