Widow: Gangs weren’t involved

There were no gang vendettas or hip-hop feuds involved in the shooting that left a man dead this weekend outside a downtown night club, according to the widow of the man shot and killed.

Instead, LaTonia Coleman said, the shooting happened after a senseless argument between her common-law husband, Robert Earl Williams, and a stranger outside the club who had interjected himself in a family-related dispute.

“I feel like he was shot and killed just from a misunderstanding,” Coleman said.

Investigation continues

Coleman spoke out about the case Wednesday as police continued to seek leads in the shooting, which happened shortly before 2:15 a.m. Sunday after a hip-hop concert at the Granada, 1020 Mass. As of Wednesday, no arrests had been made, and police have said they were having a difficult time getting witnesses to talk.

Coleman appealed to any eyewitnesses to come forward with information.

She said she and her husband had been together for 14 years and had recently moved back to Lawrence after living briefly in Denver, where her husband worked as a janitor. He’d been staying with family in Topeka for the past week, she said, and planned to get a job in Lawrence through a temp agency.

LaTonia Coleman and her son, Robert Williams, 7, visit the scene of Sunday morning's shooting, where her husband, Robert Williams, was killed and another man was injured. Coleman, who was with Williams that night, says the shooting happened after a senseless argument between her husband and a stranger outside the Granada night club.

“Our mission was to come here, get work, get a place and be closer to family,” she said.

‘Not a gangbanger’

The couple went to the Granada show because Williams was a longtime family friend of Doe, the Denver-based hip-hop artist who was headlining the concert, she said.

They were looking for fun, not trouble. Williams was decked out in a suede outfit, $125 shoes and a wide-brimmed hat, she said.

“He looked clean cut,” she said. “He’s not a gangbanger. The man’s 46 years old. … He’s retired from hustling, from the streets.”

All the performers in the concert knew her husband, she said, and at one point he was up on the stage with them.

But during the show, she said, her husband began arguing with a female acquaintance of his adult daughter’s. Several months ago, she said, Robert Williams and his daughter had a bitter dispute about money related to payment from his father’s Social Security checks, and it remains a sensitive topic, she said.

Argument escalates

The argument continued outside the club after the show ended, Coleman said. They were raising their voices and cursing, she said, when a young man who didn’t know any of the people involved confronted Williams about the argument, saying “Why are you all up in her face?”

The two men then began arguing. Coleman said her husband “was mad because this man was making a comment on an argument that had nothing to do with him.”

Then, she said, the other man pulled his coat aside to show a gun stuffed into his waistband. Coleman said she pulled her husband back and one of the hip-hop performers who was leaving the club came and broke up the fight.

At that point, she said, she and her husband got in their car and drove around to the alley behind the Granada, where they had been told a limousine would be arriving to take the hip-hop artists to an after-party in Kansas City. The couple planned to follow the limousine to the party, she said.

But when they drove around back, they were told the limousine was pulling up in front of the club. So they went back.

Shots fired

Coleman said she dropped her husband off in the crosswalk so that he could approach the limousine and find out the location of the party. She was driving south on Massachusetts Street when she heard five shots ring out.

She looked back and saw her husband running away from the crowd. A 22-year-old man – whom Coleman said she didn’t know – also was shot and ran around the back of the Granada.

The 22-year-old was taken to a Kansas City hospital, but no official word was available Wednesday on his condition.

Williams made it halfway across Massachusetts Street and collapsed on the ground.

Coleman got out of the car and ran to him. Police said he was declared dead at the hospital, but Coleman said he died in her arms.

“He said to me, ‘I love you,’ and took a breath, and he was gone,” she said.

Coleman said she didn’t see the shooting, but she believes the person who shot her husband was the same person he’d argued with earlier. She described him as a dark-skinned black male about 5 feet 8 inches tall with a short “Afro”-style hairdo and wearing a plain black jacket.

“For us to leave and to drive off and come back, he must have thought that my husband had left to go get a gun,” she said.

She believes the other man decided, at that point, to shoot first.