In The Line of Fire

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I was so proud when I became a police officer.

Police Officer Isabella Lovedina.

I knew that it was not a job that a lot of people can do.

And it made me feel so good that I could go out there and do that.

I knew that I wanted to do something that was going to make a difference and that I could help people.

I met Isabella on an accident.

I knew that he was a fireman and was wearing all his fire gear and every girl thinks that's attractive or most women.

I thought, how cool is this?

This beautiful little petite girl that's, you know,

a police officer.

It was literally love at first sight.

He seemed like he would be really kind.

In October of 2009, Nick and I were taking an EMT class together.

I said, why don't you come over to my grandmother's house?

We can have dinner and after dinner we can study together.

I really felt comfortable in that house.

There was just a really warm feeling.

I'm sure the people that lived there, you know, Nick's family, it had a lot to do with why I felt that way.

Isabella and I finished studying around 12.30.

Nick always walked me outside to watch me get in the car, make sure I was safe.

I walked her out to the car

and she put away her gun and her bulletproof vest.

I went back to give Nick a hug goodbye.

It was only a matter of

a minute

before I heard tires squealing.

I remember

her eyes getting really big

and I see the fear in her eyes.

And I turn

and right as I'm turning there's two black males

walking really fast at us with their guns drawn.

One of them said, give me whatever you got.

And I said, I don't have anything.

I can't give them my car keys because I have a gun in the car.

And right away they point towards my grandmother's house.

One of the guys said, who's in the house?

I said, please leave.

There's women and children in that house.

I knew that there was two little boys in there.

I knew that Nick's grandmother and aunt was sleeping inside.

I...

knew that it wasn't going to end there.

I knew that they weren't just going to leave.

Then they directed us at gunpoint to go inside.

Right when we get into the house, they became very angry.

It was,

put your head on the ground.

I'll kill you.

They're going to kill us all.

My mind just went into police mode.

What am I going to do to keep everybody in this house safe

and get them out?

We got down on our knees in the hallway and it's a very narrow long hallway and we were facing the wall.

I was constantly

peeking at them, trying to memorize their features, what they were wearing,

any kind of description I could give to the police.

One of them was wearing a red hoodie and dark pants.

The other one was wearing a black hoodie.

The guy in the black hoodie kneeled down behind me.

And he leaned over and

I could feel his breath

on my ear and

in a very sexual way grabbed my butt.

At that point,

I started

to think,

I'm going to be raped tonight.

I started to prepare myself to be raped.

I remember getting so angry.

And I tried to get up a little bit.

And right away he stuck the gun in my head and said, I'll blow your brains out.

He made me feel

just

really

small.

I remember seeing the guy in the red hoodie go upstairs.

My grandmother was there.

My Aunt Rosie.

and my cousin Gina was there with her kids, Ben and Sam.

I'm not sure what time it was, and I heard my daughter Gina crying at the foot of my bed.

And I immediately woke up and I said to Gina, are you sick?

Because she had been in the hospital.

And when I turned to my left, I saw a man in a red hoodie next to my bed with a gun.

And he was telling me to get up.

He

pointed the gun at Gina and said, get the TV.

By that time, Gina was crying and said,

I can't lift it.

It's too heavy.

He told her that he was going to shoot her if she did not pick up that TV.

Gina was diagnosed at 19 with stomach cancer.

From being sick when she was younger, she had a chronic illness.

And so a couple times a year, she would end up in the hospital overnight.

That night, I went to the hospital to pick Gina up, talked her in to coming to spend the night.

She really didn't want to.

And all the times, in all the years

that I brought Gina home from the hospital, This was the only time that I brought her to my house.

I saw Gina carrying this large, older television down the stairs, and the guy in the red hoodie had the gun pointed to her back following her down.

And

once she got downstairs and

knelt down next to me,

all she wanted,

all she asked, was if it was okay if she could check on her kids.

They just yelled back,

I'll kill you, bitch.

Shut up.

Put your head on the ground.

Tears were rolling down her face, and

she looked directly at me and she said, Oh my god, Isabella, please help.

And I felt so

helpless.

I was playing scenarios in my head

of how I can

get my gun out of the car and help people.

I just kept trying to think of a way.

Rose and Ida were brought downstairs.

One of the gunmen directed Gina to go down in the basement with him.

I believed that they were going to rape her down there and I stood up and I turned around and I said, Gina, you stay here.

I'll go down there.

After I stood up, they said, everyone, go down in the basement.

I thought I was going to die.

I thought everyone was going to die.

And that was my breaking point.

I thought, I'm not going to let this happen.

I'm not going to go out that way.

I looked down the barrel of the gun and

with everything that I had in me, I

lunged towards the guy with the black hoodie and began to fight.

He was airborne into the front door.

She literally threw him into the air.

At that point, Nicholas jumped up.

The guy in the red hoodie, I'm wrestling with him.

It happens so fast.

I ran out the door, and as soon as the door slammed, I heard pow, pow, bam, bam, bam.

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I remember hearing a bunch of gunfire.

Pop, pop, pop.

And I thought, should I go back in there?

I gotta try and get help.

I gotta...

I have to try to get the police here.

I did not know who had survived or

who had died.

I started just running

up to random doors, screaming and pounding on the doors, begging for somebody to open the door.

Nobody would open their door.

I just kept running.

I'd run down one set of steps and run up another set.

Please let me in.

I turn

and all I see is Isabella down on the floor in a fetal position.

And the guy in the black hoodie is standing right over her, just shooting her, shooting her and shooting her.

I looked down

and I

saw blood

on

my t-shirt.

And at that point, I realized that I had been shot in the chest.

Then I feel an explosion from my neck.

And then right after that, I can feel warm blood just dripping down the whole front of my chest.

Then they were gone.

They must have ran out of the house.

I remember people screaming, where's the cell phone?

We don't have a cell phone.

Nobody could find the cell phone to call 911.

Ida was screaming, where's Rose?

They took Rose.

I couldn't find Rosie, and I panicked.

I don't know where my daughter is.

They must have taken her.

Where's Rose?

Where's Rose?

Finally, I ran to the end of the street, and there was a light on.

And I saw a woman in there, and I was begging and screaming for her to open the door and

let me in.

But she wouldn't let me in.

I remember Isabella crawling towards me, saying, Nick, Nick, I can't breathe.

I said, Bella, Bella, everything's gonna be okay.

Just stay with me.

Keep your eyes open and keep breathing.

And I said, Hold on one second, because I saw

Gina

laying there.

Her eyes are wide open.

I kept thinking maybe she passed out or they knocked her out.

And her son, Sam,

was

right behind me and said, Nick, is

my mommy okay?

I said, honey, she's okay.

She fainted.

She's gonna be okay.

I didn't know what else to say to him.

While all this chaos is going on in the house, somehow Sam is able to find a cell phone and he makes a call to 911.

Hello, is this 911?

We've got three people shot and we've been robbed.

Did they come into your home?

They came into my grandma's home and my grandma's.

We're at 902, Hickory.

It just began to get

more difficult for me to breathe.

My eyes kept closing.

My head kept dropping.

Bella, hang in there.

There's an ambulance on the way.

Just stay with me.

Stay with me.

Then I heard sirens, and I thought, I'm just going to run back to the house because thank God the police are finally here.

We see a female running down the street in her nightgown.

She's waving her hands over her head.

She states over and over again, my God, they're shot.

Everybody's shot.

I'm yelling to the female.

How many are shot?

Are the suspects gone?

All she keeps saying is they're shot.

She's a police officer.

She's shot.

And at that point, I ran as fast as I could towards that home.

The night watch sergeant was on the scene, and he just turned and looked and said, it's Izzy.

I knew immediately he was referring to Officer Lovedina.

I wasn't sure how bad she was hit.

Once I got through the door, there was a look of relief on her face that there were police officers there.

It was chaos.

There were police cars and paramedics and ambulance.

I said, look, my cousin, go get my cousin.

I just remember bringing Isabelle out on a gurney, bringing Nick out.

Where's Gina?

Why aren't they bringing Gina out?

I just had a really, really bad feeling.

I hate bullies.

I always hated bullies.

And criminals are bullies.

My pager went off.

The text message on the pager was that a police officer had been shot.

You know, I knew I had to get to the scene right away.

And I knew that responsibility was going to fall heavily on me to make sure that everything got done properly.

And as I'm walking up, I'm seeing officers walking away from the scene.

Some are crying.

And all have that stunned look on their face because a police officer just got shot.

I felt a lot of pressure

to not make any mistakes.

I immediately assigned two detectives to process the crime scene.

I needed to assign detectives to take care of those two small kids.

I needed to make sure they get with somebody that's going to comfort them.

These little kids that were there, they're defenseless.

Eugene Stallis

was defenseless.

When I woke up from my first surgery at the hospital, they told me that Gina didn't make it.

And I had this

overwhelming sense of

guilt.

Maybe if

I would have trained a little bit harder and

taking a gun away from somebody, maybe if I would have done a better job,

that she'd still be here.

The kids

really

didn't know until I told them the next morning that their mom had died, although I believe that Sam already knew that.

He saw a lot, way too much for...

a little boy that's 10 years old.

She was a single mom.

She loved being a mom to those two boys.

I mean, Gina was all they had.

I mean, she did everything for them.

Sam and Ben know how wonderful Gina was, but most of us get to experience that for our whole life about how great our mom is.

And

they just won't have that.

I sent two detectives to St.

Louis University Hospital to interview Nick.

and Isabel if possible so

we can get some information, better descriptions, or anything else that we can glean to help find these guys.

Nick was being tended to by doctors,

and I asked if he could give me more of a description.

Now that he's had a little bit of time,

the doctor yelled, No, nobody's coming in here.

Nick yelled right back, No, she's coming in, she's getting the description.

So I told one of the detectives that they both had sneakers on, dark pants.

One individual had a red hoodie and one individual had a black hoodie.

The individual with the red hoodie had two gold teeth.

I was shot three times

and I have one bullet that went just under my ear

and it traveled

through

the back of my neck,

hit my spinal cord.

The doctor came in and said, we were not going to operate on you.

It's going to be too risky.

You could get paralyzed.

And now the bullet sits vertically, up and down in front of my C1, so in this area.

So, and it looks like about that big.

A short time after the robbery at 902 Hickory, a man goes into the ER at Barnes Hospital here in St.

Louis.

He's there because he's been shot in his hand.

He tells the people in the ER that he's a victim himself, and he tells them he was shot during a botched robbery, basically.

The police were notified that there's a gunshot victim at Barnes Hospital ER.

A very smart and astute X-ray tech takes note of several things while she is treating him.

She notices that he has gold teeth.

And he starts talking to her and he asks her to take away his red hooded sweatshirt because it's covered in blood.

The x-ray technician told the police officer what she observed.

She told him that she just felt something was not right.

I got information that there was a potential suspect that was being admitted to Barnes with an injury to his hand and that he fit the description of one of the people involved in this crime.

When they walk out the front doors of the ER, police officers see the man in the red-hooded sweatshirt's car parked out front.

And standing right next to the car is another man.

The police officer follows this man into Forest Park.

And he sees him throw an object to the ground.

And he feels that this man is involved and he does a search of this man and he finds jewelry belonging to Ida Ida Rask.

And he's put under arrest.

Another officer is brought in to help look for the object that was thrown down to the ground.

And as they search that area in Forest Park where that man walked, they find the black gun.

After the man in the park is arrested, He tells the police his name and it is determined that he was the man in the black hooded sweatshirt and his name is Mario Coleman.

The man inside the hospital was the man wearing the red hooded sweatshirt, and his name is Liddale Nathan.

Getting people convicted in court, somebody has to stand up and say, That's the one who did it.

I saw him do it.

It was very, very important that Nick or Isabella identified them because

Rose

and Ida Rass could not identify him.

When Sergeant Engelhurt came to the hospital and showed me the photo lineup, I

felt like I was carrying around the weight of the world.

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I remember one of the doctors telling me that I

had been shot three times point blank to the front side of my body.

And after falling down to the ground, I was shot two more times.

I felt like I fell into a black hole

mentally.

I

didn't think that I would ever

feel any better.

Isabel is laying in bed.

She has IVs attached to her.

She has hard monitors attached to her.

There's beeping and buzzing of the machines.

I was just very, very nervous talking to her because I admire so much what she did.

I told Isabella that we're really confident that we had the people responsible.

But I told her, hey, you know what you got to do.

You got to point to the guy.

I was very fearful that

I wasn't going to be able to do it.

I could see your eyes start to well up with tears.

I still had so many different emotions.

I show Isabella two sheets.

Mario Coleman's on one.

Liddell Nathan's on another one.

I do remember that there were different faces.

They all had similar features.

I instantly pointed to each one of them and said, these are the guys.

Mario Coleman is the guy that was wearing the black hoodie and that had the silver gun.

He was the shooter.

And Liddale Nathan Jr.

is the guy that was wearing the red hoodie.

These two men went into this house and they literally terrorized four generations of this family.

Mario Coleman and Liddell Nathan were charged acting together in this crime.

They were both charged with murder in the first degree.

As a prosecutor, every case becomes personal to you.

Rose had called me and asked if I would talk to Sam, who was nine at the time.

We were sitting in the waiting room.

John came out to get Sam, and I said, would you like for me to come in he said no Graham I think I will just go and talk to him by myself he came down in a school uniform and he sat down and he pulled out his note card he had this little three by five note card and he had a series of five or six questions written on the note card he wanted to know you know the strengths and weaknesses of our case he wanted to know what the punishments potentially could be You don't want to over promise something to a child because they're looking at you as you know the adult they want to trust you and you don't want to violate that trust he's been through so much

Liddale Nathan was tried first Liddale Nathan was 16 at the time but a juvenile court judge decided to certify him to stand trial as an adult Because he was only 16 years old, there's only limited information that we have about him.

At trial, his defense attorney tried to talk about his rough upbringing and how he had a hard life.

However, that evidence was really kept out of the trial by the trial judge.

After hearing the defense opening, I became very angry.

They pretty much said that because of me, the gun went off seven different times.

It's a horrible feeling always questioning myself if I did a good enough job that night if I did the right thing and then to have

the blame

be put on me

it was very emotional

we had been in court all week Finally, the jury came back with a verdict.

It only took them three hours.

It was a guilty verdict.

I knew in my head that it was a temporary feeling of relief, but

I still allowed myself to feel it.

After Liddale Nathan was found guilty, we knew it wasn't over.

We still had to go to trial for Mario Coleman.

Mario Coleman was no stranger to the criminal justice system.

At the time of the murder, he was on probation for two different felony cases.

It makes me really angry that a person that has done this type of crime twice gets a third chance.

Because my daughter, Gina, had never committed a crime and she didn't get any chance.

And when I first seen Mario Coleman, it was shocking.

He looked completely different than he looked that night.

It's like my mind couldn't even really grasp

that

this person tried to kill me.

This person killed Gina.

Mario Coleman's defense is that he was inside the house at 9-02 Hickory.

However, he pointed the finger at Liddale Nathan and said Liddale Nathan was the man holding the silver gun and ultimately shot Gina Stallis.

There was a lot of times in that courtroom when I wanted to like just jump up and say this is all a lie.

None of this that he's saying is true.

The challenge with respect to Mario Coleman's case was: our eyewitnesses were all identifying him as being the shooter.

However, the DNA on the murder weapon was to the juvenile Liddale Nathan.

Our belief was that they were switching guns constantly throughout this particular case and that Liddale Nathan was the last to have touched that gun.

I really, really wanted Mario Coleman

to never,

ever come outside of prison.

Because there was no doubt in my mind that if he was ever released, he would kill again.

When we were waiting for the verdict for Mario Coleman, it seemed like minutes were hours.

What time is it?

What time is it?

What time is it?

There's always that risk.

They could walk him out of the courtroom.

Does the jury reach the verdict?

Yes, ma'am.

I was trying to look at the jurors, just try to read something.

Oh my God.

What are they going to say?

We, the jury, find the defendant, Mario Coleman, guilty of murder in the first degree.

There was a sense of relief.

I was sitting next to Sam.

He was so nervous.

He bites his nails when he's nervous.

I could see his whole body just kind of sink back and relax, and just this big smile come across his face.

I felt like justice was served.

I had no intention of giving a victim impact statement at Mario Coleman's sentencing.

At the very last minute, I decided that I am going to get up there and say something to him.

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During the sentencing of Mario Coleman, traditionally what happens is the victim's family has a right to address the court or to address the defendant.

When Rose stepped up,

she was not forgiving.

You came to terrorize us.

So really, you're nothing but a coward.

I'm not going to talk about my daughter to you.

It would be disrespectful to her.

And I hope you rot in hell because I'm living in my own hell.

Well, I'm sorry, Matt.

I have to ask you to

be moderate.

Well,

he doesn't deserve moderate.

I was right there with Rose.

I could understand where she was coming from.

And I completely agree with what she said.

I felt great.

I needed to say that to him.

Somebody kills your child.

I

I

it's this it's an indescribable pain miss Slovadina

take your time

okay

um

I just wanted to tell you that

I feel bad for you

It doesn't it doesn't bring any joy to me to know that you're going to a really horrible place for the rest of your life.

Like, that doesn't make me feel any better.

I also wanted to tell you that what you did do for me that night after taking Gina's life, after completely turning everybody else's life upside down, you gave me a whole new family

that I didn't have before.

I've gained so much,

and now

you've lost everything.

And you also took a really good police officer off the streets.

That's all I have to say.

It's not about finding the the perfect words.

It's just about standing up there and having the opportunity to

tell them

what his actions did to your life.

One of the hardest things for me to deal with is the loss of my job.

Being a police officer was

the

proudest thing.

It was,

I was

more proud walking across at that stage getting my badge than I had ever been before in my life.

I really tried to

get healthy enough to return.

Unfortunately, I just

I wasn't the same.

I never got that fire back.

When a police officer retires, they have what they call a final roll call.

Prepare for inspection, sergeants, inspect your officers.

My final roll call meant a lot to me.

It was

my last day of

doing what I love to do.

It was the last time that

I would be standing with my

police family.

At my final roll call,

I was given an award from the mayor's office.

Now, therefore, I, Francis G.

Slay, mayor of the city of St.

Louis, do hereby proclaim February 6th, 2012, as Police Officer Isabella Love Adina Day in the City city of St.

Louis.

I think Isabella Lovadina is one of the bravest people I've ever known.

It's like somebody jumping on a hand grenade.

I mean, she was willing to sacrifice her life for all those people.

At this point, Isabella and I aren't dating.

And I mean, although I might not see her or we might not see each other, as long as she's happy, it makes me happy.

I just want the best for her.

She's a part of the family now.

I'm a mom again,

so

my life has changed really for the good.

I mean, I'm really happy to have Sam and Ben.

It's hard to get back into the you know

soccer and baseball and school and homework.

But I wouldn't change one thing about that.

So I was in a car accident and I had hit my head against a windshield and then a couple days later I was sitting at the edge of my bed and I feel a lump in the back of my throat and over a few minutes this lump gets bigger and bigger and I sorta bend over and I cough and when I do this object flies out of my mouth and when I bend over to grab it, I realize it's the bullet.

The same bullet that was lodged in my cervical spine.

It had finally worked its way out through, I guess, the base of my throat.

I looked at how small this bullet was

and just couldn't believe how one little bullet had killed my cousin Gina.

But at the same time, it's

it's made me think a lot about how Isabella and I are a miracle.

I look at my life differently now.

I see how fragile it really is and

how it can be taken away

so fast and

without without any notice.

On my birthday,

I thank God that

I'm here and

it makes my birthday that much more special.

I don't have

a new career picked out.

I do know I will continue to go to school until I find whatever it is.

And I still know that I want to help people.

It's just going to be in a different way now.

Mario Coleman was sentenced to life without parole.

Liddale Nathan was re-sentenced in 2014 and could be eligible for parole after 75 years.