Rooster in Review: RIP Greg Coleman Jr.

With his killers behind bars and $27 million awarded to his family in a wrongful death lawsuit, I hope my friend can finally rest easily.

The late Greg Coleman Jr. and his father, Greg Coleman Sr., in happier times.

Yesterday, a Franklin County jury awarded the estate of my late friend, the honorable Gregory Coleman Jr., $27 million in the verdict of a wrongful death lawsuit.

It’s a small modicum of justice after watching a Facebook video of one of my best friends in life being sucker-punched and beaten on High Street before being left for dead.

I hope the verdict provides relief to his surviving daughter, his sister, and his parents—no matter how infantile $27 million might feel in lieu of their loss.

I would like to thank every lawyer, both public and private, who litigated the prosecution of the perpetrators and the individuals ultimately responsible for the events of Sept. 5, 2022.

I’d also like to thank Bethany Bruner of The Columbus Dispatch for covering the verdict and writing an article worthy of my friend’s eternal memory. Without going into details, I learned early in the process that, due to my deep connection to the case, it was best for everyone involved if I maintained my distance as a private spectator and professional commentator.

It’ll be three years off the sauce for me in a couple of days. And while it feels like an eternity since Greg’s murder, it also feels like last week when, after enduring the heaviest blow of psychic damage in my life, I wanted nothing more than to storm into the nearest bar despite roughly 35 days of sobriety.

Nobody would have blamed me, maybe not even my friends who had finally convinced me to stop killing myself one double Tito shot at a time. Maybe I would have gotten drunk that night and continued my quest for sobriety the next day.

I guess we’ll never know. Because for whatever reason, in that moment where I wanted nothing more than to drink, I realized that I was using my friend’s death to justify my own selfish behavior—a pattern that I had only recently begun to rectify and change at the young and noble age of 35 years old.

And given that I didn’t use Greg’s death as an excuse to drink, all the other temptations that have come my way over the last three years have felt minuscule in comparison. It’s to the point where I don’t think about alcohol much at all, no matter my moods.

I shake my head knowing the last time I spent with Greg was doing what we had done throughout our relationship: Cloaking the trauma that bonded our camaraderie with substance abuse.

I regret that he never saw me sober, or that I never got to annoy him by proselytizing the advantages of that lifestyle to him, too. That all was taken from me.

I hope that, in the next life, I’ll be able to have a normal relationship with alcohol and mind-altering substances. But if not, that’s fine, too, because seeing my old friend once again will be a satisfactory payoff nonetheless.

RIP Greg. I miss you, buddy.

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This week in Ohio Man…

I’m not going to lie, when I saw the headline of an Ohio mayor almost killing a man with his car, I reflexively hoped that we finally had enough to shuttle Mayor Suburbs to The Hague.

Alas!

From whio.com:

BUTLER, Ohio — An Ohio mayor admitted to running over a suspect police wanted in jail.

Surveillance video shows the village of Butler’s mayor, Wesley Dingus, running over Anthony Ward with a red car on July 11, breaking his leg.

[…]

Ward was convicted of sexual battery and was wanted for violating parole.

Fletcher said Dingus saw Ward in the passenger seat of a car.

The mayor followed the car while calling the village of Butler’s police chief.

This Ward fella sounds like a bad hombre. But my god, could you imagine having to explain to your fellow prisoners that the mayor crushed your leg during your apprehension? It would be the final indignity that would almost assuredly send me off this mortal coil.

Please, Mayor Suburbs, do not get any ideas.

Although now that I think about it, the mayor clipping me in a fit of road rage would do crazy numbers for The Business Line, even if I weren’t around to enjoy that windfall.

This week in The Rooster…

Photo by Buhai Alexandru Constantin on Unsplash

It was a brisk week of business at Rooster Worldwide LLC with five dispatches, including one that broke some news about another Columbus Democrat ignoring some very simple rules of the road while piloting a 5,000-pound SUV.

• The worst “Christmas in July” ever. Ohio’s beautiful House of Representatives held an emergency session on Monday, where Speaker Matt Huffman ate shit on two of the three proposed veto overrides.

• Witness: Erica Crawley “blew through” a red light and hospitalized an old lady. Three independent witnesses affirm that, on the night of July 2, Franklin County Commissioner Erica Crawley blatantly ran a red light and t-boned an old woman in a Lexus. According to a witness, things only got more bizarre from there.

• This is what democracy looks like? It’s hard to describe the psychotic nature of the Franklin County Democratic Party’s endorsement process. But I attempted to try after witnessing the trainwreck firsthand.

• On courage. In a wildly accusatory Facebook post, State Rep. Dontavius Jarrells (D-Columbus) told me to “write about the Randolph Freedpeople.” He got what he wanted, though not as he probably imagined he would.

• The insider’s case against Jesse Vogel. Why does an affable immigration attorney repulse local Democratic leaders so much? Well, it has nothing to do with the reasons they claim.

We’ll do it again next week at the same time and place.

Until then… stay frosty, my friends!

THOSE WMDs. America’s forgotten mass imprisonment of women… The Christian Left’s battle for the Bible… The matter of the Mummy of Manchester… As prices climb, so does hunger in the United States… Police have fired less-lethal rounds for 50 years, and victims want justice.