A jury trial is underway in a Gwinnett County case that will decide the fate of three men accused of killing a former coach at a gas station last year.
Bradley Coleman, a 29-year-old father and football coach from Norcross, was putting air in his tires at a QuikTrip in Peachtree Corners on July 10, 2022, when a group of men tried to steal his Dodge Charger, according to Gwinnett police. He was fatally shot while trying to fight them off.
David Booker, 22, Miles Collins, 21, and Josiah Hughley, 21, were arrested in the weeks that followed. They are accused of being members of the Bloods gang and face gang charges, as well as murder and hijacking a vehicle.
Credit: Gwinnett County Police Department
Credit: Gwinnett County Police Department
According to court documents, the state plans to bring forward evidence of gang activity, arguing that the trio planned to take Coleman’s vehicle by force in order to help the gang and to maintain or increase their status in the gang. Some of that evidence will include tattoos, social media posts and text messages, Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge Tamela Adkins has ruled.
Police have said that one of the suspects climbed into his driver’s seat to steal it. Coleman then got into the passenger side in an attempt to stop the theft, but a second suspect got out of a Mercedes-Benz and got involved in the fight. That is when the suspects got out of the car and fired at Coleman, police said.
Prosecutors also will note evidence of prior auto thefts for all three men, court documents show. In Booker’s case, he was convicted in 2019 of theft by receiving stolen property.
The defendants have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to suppress statements they made to detectives following their arrest. Two requests that were granted involved Booker’s responses to further questioning after asserting his right to remain silent.
A detective continued interrogating him after he said he did not want to talk, court records state. The judge found that, while investigators can legally reinitiate contact with a defendant at a later point, “the failure of law enforcement to scrupulously honor the defendant’s initial invocation of his right to remain silent precludes the police from benefiting from the subsequent attempt to question (him),” Adkins wrote.
Those statements cannot be used at trial, which began Thursday after three days of jury selection.
During an earlier preliminary hearing for Collins, a Gwinnett detective testified that license plate readers helped police track the suspects. Authorities were able to obtain the tag number of the Mercedes and linked that to a car rental agreement. Police made contact with the man who rented the car, who confirmed that Collins and Booker returned it about 90 minutes after the fatal shooting.
The detective said once they obtained video from the gas station, the suspects could be seen “looking for cars to steal. For several hours, they were repeatedly driving through.”
Coleman, a Norcross High School graduate who lived in Louisiana, was in town visiting his young daughter when he was killed. He played college football at Southern University and then coached at Peachtree Ridge High School.
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