The suspect was naked and seemed to be running aimlessly. That was what rookie Officer Tommy Pleasant said he noticed first as he turned onto a road in Anne Arundel County just before dusk in May.
As Pleasant later described it to a detective, he knew he'd found the man police were searching for that evening, a suspect who a short time earlier had fired a handgun inside a home a few blocks away. Pleasant said that as he stepped from his cruiser, he began to draw his weapon even before both feet were on the ground.
The naked man turned. His eyes "appeared to be as big as golf balls," Pleasant said, "like he was looking through my eyes and beyond me."
Pleasant's statement, along with other documents from the investigation of the fatal shooting that followed, was released in response to a public records request from The Washington Post. The records add fresh detail to the May 24 encounter that ended in the death of Donald Coates during what police have characterized as "close-quarters contact."
Coates, who was 20 and unarmed, was shot in the face, the chest, the back of the neck and the back of his left forearm. One of those shots, or a fifth bullet, grazed his chest, a medical examiner found. The medical examiner found no powder burns on Coates's body and concluded in an autopsy report that "there was no evidence of close-range discharge of a firearm surrounding any of the gunshot wounds."
According to Thomas Mauriello, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is not involved in the case, that finding suggests that Pleasant's weapon was at least three or four feet from Coates when the shots were fired.
A grand jury decided in September that Pleasant, now 23, is not criminally responsible for Coates's death. James Rhodes, a Baltimore lawyer, said he expects to file a lawsuit over the shooting in federal court on behalf of Coates's family.
Coates's mother, Deborah Bell of Baltimore, faulted Pleasant for drawing his weapon so quickly. Even if he had felt her son was lunging toward him, she said yesterday, "it still wasn't right for him to shoot him the way he shot him, not that many times."
About a month before the encounter in Glen Burnie, according to the records, a sergeant in the Anne Arundel police department distributed a bulletin with the headline "Naked Suspects: No Laughing Matter." The bulletin, produced by researchers at Minnesota State University, warns that confrontations with naked suspects pose unrecognized risks and that deadly force "may end up being necessary."
Pleasant's attorney, Michael Davey, has not returned calls seeking comment in recent days. But according to the records released to The Post, he drew the bulletin to the attention of investigators early on. The bulletin describes an incident from two decades ago in which a naked man in another state disarmed and killed a police officer. "Some of the most dangerous people cops run into are naked offenders," says the bulletin, by the Force Science Research Center.
In his statement, Pleasant said he had read the bulletin. He did not specifically say whether it influenced his thinking during the encounter with Coates.
According to the statement, which he gave at police headquarters in June, Pleasant told Detective Richard Alban that he could see Coates's hands and that he realized Coates was unarmed. He told Alban that he suspected Coates was under the influence of drugs and that he believed he had no option but to shoot when Coates ran toward him "at a full head of steam."
"The nude black male showed no emotion, no expression, and there was no movement in his face at all," Pleasant told Alban.
Pleasant said he retreated toward the back of his patrol car as Coates approached. Pleasant said he had both hands on his gun -- leaving him, he said, unable to use any nonlethal measure to subdue Coates.
"As the nude black male reached for my head and gun area, his hands were all in my face, I was in fear for my life and fired my service weapon," Pleasant said.
"Nothing changed," he said. "The nude black male didn't say oww, his expression didn't change."
Still fearing for his life, Pleasant said, he fired again, "at which time the nude black male dropped straight to the ground."
Earlier that evening, Coates, who witnesses said had been using marijuana, dialed 911 from a home on Allen Road, where he sometimes stayed with his girlfriend and their newborn.
Coates, then apparently delusional, can be heard on the tape firing a gun after telling the dispatcher that people are after him and in the house. "Can you please hurry up, man, somebody's trying to kill me," Coates says.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Deborah Bell, left, with her son's girlfriend, Chelsia Wallace, and their son, Kyron Coates, in Bell's north Baltimore home. Donald Coates was shot to death by an Anne Arundel County police officer. (By Mark Gail -- The Washington Post) 
The naked guy was unarmed, was shot in the face, the chest, the back of the neck? What's wrong with that cop? Cops sometimes make the biggest mistake that cost people their lives. Sometimes Cops need to know how to handle it in a different way instead of shooting a person numeric of times. I'm disappointing on how the cop handle the situation. It turns out not a good ending on how it made out. I give that cop a big thumbs down, for it's stupidest.