Dominique Coleman was on the phone with the man who drove her to work in the morning, rubbed her aching feet at night, and told her “every single day” that he loved her.
“I’m outside walking in,” Miguel “Mook” Tharpe said as he stepped out of his truck, cell phone on his ear.
She heard a single gunshot that sounded like a loud firecracker, and her cousin burst through the screen door.
“He said: ‘Mook’s been hit! Mook’s been hit!’” Coleman said.
This was 10 p.m. Tuesday night. Tharpe, at that moment laying on the ground bleeding from gunshot wounds to the chest and arm, died at the hospital just after 10:30.
Coleman said some of her cousins had been arguing with a group of men from the neighborhood, but her aunt had walked over to talk to them, and thought the matter was smoothed over. Apparently it wasn’t, and whoever the shooter was appears to have thought Tharpe was part of the dispute, Coleman said.
“Mook didn’t know anything about what was going on,” she said. “He walked up to him and said: ‘Who you on that phone with? Get off that phone.’ Mook said: ‘This is my phone.’ He just started shooting him.”
Coleman, 28, sobbed as she talked about the man she had been dating for more than 10 years.
“This man right here, anybody you talk to is going to have something good to say about him. He helped everybody.”
Tharpe worked hard, and made a good living cleaning up and maintaining properies in foreclosure, Coleman said. She laughed that she used to chastise him for giving away so much of his money.
“He said ‘I’m not going to sit there eating, right in somebody’s face, when they have nothing to eat for themselves.”
Coleman said she was planning a surprise party for him on his birthday, July 15.
“He’s always doing things for other people, I wanted to do something nice for him,” she said.
She also said her boyfriend was a romantic.
He said ‘I love you’ so much,” she said. “He told me that every day. He told me that every single day.”
Coleman said she can’t imagine what her life will be like without Tharpe.
“I went to sleep last night, and I heard him in my ear. He said: ‘Come here.’ My eyes popped open and there was nothing there. I realized he was gone forever.”
- John Carpenter
Dominique Coleman and Miguel Tharpe, shortly after they met, 10 years ago.