Does Napoleon Beazley Deserve to Die?
He was the hero of his hometown—football star, senior class president, the first black kid ever to be accepted by whites. And then, when he was seventeen, he committed a brutal, senseless murder. Now he's on death row, waiting for the courts to decide . . .
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Cedrick Coleman was back in Grapeland by then, having dropped out of Navarro College in Corsicana—not a Big Ten school, as he had hoped; his grades were too bad—and after an injury in the fall of 1993, he was no longer the football star he had once been. He and Napoleon grew closer, each deflated by ruined dreams. Napoleon bought a gun that outshone Cedrick's .25-caliber pistol and kept it tucked in his jeans. The two friends were playing video games one afternoon when Cedrick mentioned a drug dealer he knew in Palestine who had carjacked a Mercedes and proposed that they do the same. "You down with that?" he asked. Napoleon—the president of his senior class, honor student, top athlete—answered him with little hesitation. "I'm down with that," he replied. And so on April 19, 1994, Napoleon, Cedrick, and Fig would drive to Tyler with loaded guns.
[When I told my mother that the FBI had arrested three people, she] collapsed on the floor of the kitchen. It was a writhing kind of pain I had never seen in my life. I went down on my knees to comfort her, and she cried. . . . I thought my mother was having either a stroke or an attack, but all she was doing was coming to grips for the first time with the fact that this was really done for a car, for a ten-year-old car.
testimony of J. Michael Luttig
JIMMY MOFFETT HAD A BAD FEELING THE next morning in first-period government class when he saw that Napoleon's chair was empty. Since kindergarten, he had never known Napoleon to miss a day of school. Jimmy was taken aback later that day when he caught sight of his friend, who seemed not of this world: Napoleon had dark circles beneath his eyes and his expression was grim, his shoulders slumped in resignation. He did not flash his usual easy grin. When Jimmy asked what was wrong, Napoleon stared through him. Napoleon unburdened himself two days later as they walked to the gym to have their yearbook pictures taken: Jimmy was Mr. Grapeland High School, Napoleon the runner-up. Napoleon lowered his voice until it was almost inaudible. He and the Colemans had stolen a car, he said morosely. He had shot the driver and shot at the driver's wife. It had happened so fast, he said. It had all been a mistake. Jimmy found this admission so disturbing that, as an adult, he would be married for three years before he could speak of it to his wife. "I couldn't imagine Napoleon doing anything that violent," he says. "I asked him, 'Why did you take a loaded gun? Why did you have to shoot the man?' and he had no answer." The crime had been for naught: Napoleon and Fig drove the Mercedes only a few blocks before it got a flat tire, and they were forced to abandon it. Cedrick, who had followed them, drove them back to Grapeland. "It would've been better if we'd gotten the car," Napoleon told Jimmy.
A massive FBI manhunt was already under way: Carjacking is a federal crime that falls under the FBI's jurisdiction, and this particular carjacking's link to the father of a federal judge only intensified the scrutiny. Investigators had little to go on during the 47 days it took to crack the case, but loose lips would help them. Fig soon blurted out the details of the murder to his girlfriend and his stepfather, and though Jimmy kept Napoleon's confession in confidence until later questioned by FBI investigators, teenagers in the Quarters began to whisper. Napoleon ate and slept little that spring, but he tried to keep up appearances, pouring himself into fanatical workouts that left him spent and weak-kneed. The strain showed: In photos from that time, he is often pictured standing off to the side, smiling weakly. To the Beazleys, he seemed subdued, but Rena took his changed behavior—he went to church on his own, he stopped teasing his little brother, Jamaal, he stuck close to home—as signs of maturity. "I thought he was getting his priorities straight before graduation," she says. "I didn't think to dig deeper." Her son had a private moment of reckoning that May at the state track meet in Austin, moments before running in the four-hundred-meter relay. As he crouched in the blocks, listening to the cheers of the crowd, he was overcome with a sense of regret so piercing that it felt like physical pain. This was what his future should have been.
Two weeks after Napoleon graduated from high school with honors, one week before he was set to leave for the Marines, a Crime Stoppers tip—settling an old score, perhaps—sent FBI agents in Tyler hurrying south to Grapeland. The Colemans were arrested after a lengthy interrogation that night, June 6, and near midnight, Napoleon was read his rights at his grandmother's house as his father looked on in disbelief. Ireland followed the convoy of police cruisers—one holding Napoleon, another Cedrick, another Fig—down the dark, two-lane country roads that led north to Tyler, as incredulity gave way to a profound sense of dread. Only later did he learn that his son faced capital murder charges. "There was a moment where I could've talked to Napoleon, but I was so devastated, I couldn't find the words," says Ireland. "The FBI had shown me the Colemans' statements, and that blew my mind. They said my son killed a man. Even if he's proven guilty a hundred times, he's still my son." As the sun came up over Tyler that morning, Ireland sat in his black pick-up truck and bowed his head in prayer, weeping in the first light of day. He composed himself long enough to consult with a local defense attorney before Napoleon's arraignment that morning. "He said he couldn't represent my son, because he knew the Luttigs," recalls Ireland. "Then he said he had to prepare me—that my son would be killed for this."
Bail was set at $1 million. In a city unacquainted with carjackings and businessmen being gunned down in their driveways, the brutality of John Luttig's murder had sparked outrage. "This was a predatory hunt down of the victims in a totally random manner, and that was one reason the crime was so shocking to the community," says Smith County criminal district attorney Jack Skeen, Jr. Emotions ran so high in the courtroom at his son's arraignment, Ireland says, "The feeling I got was that if someone had hollered, 'Let's get a rope,' they would have hung him from the highest tree."
Napoleon was taken to the Smith County jail as word traveled through Grapeland that he had been arrested for murder. "It was like a knife through the heart of this town," says Sandra Kerby, the editor of the Grapeland Messenger. "There was shock, sadness, a sense of disbelief." Many assumed that the Colemans had pinned the murder on Napoleon or that they had goaded him into pulling the trigger. His arrest, even to his closest friends, was mystifying—and set off what would be years of pained examination, not just of Napoleon but of themselves. "There may have been times when he was asking us for help, for guidance, and we were so comfortable in our own lives that we didn't notice," says T. C. Howard. "Was there something we could've done? Something we could've seen? We looked hard. When we'd all get together, we'd try to have a good time, but the conversation always came back to Napoleon. We all felt guilty."
That day, Casey Vickers received a collect call from the Smith County jail. When the phone rang, Casey was sitting in his parents' living room, his hands dirty from loading feed, his face hot with tears. He was overcome with emotion when he heard the voice on the other end of the line, but he said only one word: "Why?" Napoleon would never answer him. Napolean's two separate worlds had collided, leaving him at a loss for words. Napoleon cried into the receiver until their time ran out. Before he hung up he told Casey, "The world is yours."
Then the day arrives, and the trial begins, and you listen to your mom talk about how she crawled on the floor in the filth and the grease of the garage of her home to keep from being murdered by the people who just murdered her husband. . . . You listen to the pain, and you watch her face. . . . There are no words for it. You know, the idea of this elegant woman, my mother, crawling on the garage floor to keep from being murdered, that's something that you have to live with for the rest of your life.
testimony of J. Michael Luttig
FOR TWO WEEKS IN THE SPRING OF 1995, a Smith County jury weighed whether Napoleon Beazley should live or die. Had Napoleon stood trial in federal court, he would not have faced execution, for federal courts cannot impose a death sentence on a minor. Federal law is rooted in the idea that adolescents, by their nature, are less mature than adults and that the impulsiveness and poor judgment of youth are mitigating factors that should exempt teenagers from the ultimate punishment. Texas law holds that seventeen-year-olds who are capable of committing "adult crimes" deserve adult punishments. Age was not made an issue at the trial by Napoleon's defense attorney, and any testimony about his past good character was overshadowed by the sickening details of his crime. The well-mannered Grapeland honors student had, according to Fig Coleman's testimony, told him to "shoot the bitch" as Bobbie Luttig lay terrorized on the garage floor that April night. "I was contemplating my own death, which I thought was imminent," John Luttig's widow told the jury, her pale face lined with grief and private sorrow. "I was wondering what the bullet would feel like as it went through my back. I was wondering what it would feel like to die."
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