KANNAPOLIS — A woman critically injured when her husband shot her in the face Wednesday has suffered violence at his hands before, according to Cabarrus County criminal records.
Marie Cline Coleman endured the abuse because she loved Dwight Goldman Coleman and prayed he would change, relatives and friends say.
Dwight Coleman, 48, is not so bad at times, they say. But he gets mean when he drinks — “mean as the devil,” one said — and he drinks a lot.
Twice before, in 1995 and 1997, Marie Coleman brought charges of assault against her husband. This week, her pastor said, she made up her mind that she’d had enough.
That was Monday night. Little more than 24 hours later, Dwight Coleman sat across the kitchen table from Marie Coleman and shot her in the mouth with a .45-caliber handgun.
Marie Coleman, 56, remains in critical condition at NorthEast Medical Center in Concord. The bullet ripped through her brain stem. Her family doesn’t expect her to live much longer.
Even if she doesn’t die, they said, she won’t have much of a life.
Dwight Coleman sits in the Cabarrus County Jail, charged with inflicting serious injury while trying to kill his wife. His bond is $150,000. He’ll appear in court April 18.
He claims it was accidental, that it happened while he and his wife were “playing” with the gun.
If Marie Coleman dies, Cabarrus County Sheriff Brad Riley said, Dwight Coleman faces a murder charge.
As their mother lay unconscious, Marie Coleman’s sons recounted a rocky relationship held together, they said, with prayer and patience.
“She really loved that man with all her heart,”Mike Howard, one of Marie Coleman’s two sons from a previous marriage, said Wednesday. “She loved him that much, to stay with him until the end, until he shot her.”
Dwight and Marie Coleman married seven years ago, a second marriage for them both. He moved into the house where she lived, at 6227 Old Concord-Salisbury Road in
Cabarrus, about a half-mile from the Rowan County line.
His family lives in Murphy.
She had the rectangular house with light-brown vinyl siding and rust-colored shutters built about 20 years ago, but her roots are firmly planted here. She grew up next door, in the brick house where her 87-year-old mother still lives.
Dwight Coleman had stopped drinking a year or two before they got married, Marie Coleman’s sons said. But it wasn’t long before he started in again on the bottom-shelf wine. And he could drink six or eight quarts at a time.
“That rotgut wine makes him mean as the devil,” Mike Howard said. “When he wasn’t drinking, he treated her pretty decent; it just got to the point that drinking was more important.”
Court records list Dwight Coleman as “unemployed” and “disabled.” Eddie Howard, Marie Coleman’s son, said the carpenter by trade was frequently unemployed, but his only disability was a neck injury sustained falling off a bed drunk.
“He worked when he wanted to,” he said. Marie Coleman has worked the past 20 years as a receptionist with the Cabarrus Health Alliance.
Neighbors heard fighting coming from the house often, said Mike Howard, who lives in China Grove. He and his brother, Eddie Howard, of Lancaster, S.C., said Dwight Coleman even threatened them when he was drunk.
Their mother sought refuge in the law, and in her faith.
In 1995, she had Dwight Coleman charged with assault on a female. According to her statement to authorities, he hit her in the head, choked her, knocked her down and threatened to kill her.
After the couple completed four sessions of domestic violence counseling at the Cabarrus Mental Health Center, the Cabarrus district attorney’s office dropped the charge.
Again in 1997, Marie Coleman filed a complaint against her husband for assault on a female.
This time, she wrote, he “flew mad” and shoved her with both hands when she refused to take him somewhere while he was on medication.
Dwight Coleman got a suspended sentence and a year on probation.
Marie Coleman’s family tried to convince her to leave Dwight Coleman, but she stayed.
“She just loved him,” Eddie Howard said. “I don’t understand that kind of love, never will.”
More than just loving him, Marie Coleman’s family said, she longed to help him overcome his problems with alcohol. And they said she did that the only way she could, by praying.
Marie Coleman has always been faithful to pray for those in need, her family said, and faithful to attend church. At Truth Temple on Moose Road, she sings in the choir.
Dwight Coleman accompanied her occasionally, said the Rev. Garland Faw, her pastor. The times he met Dwight Coleman, he found him “amiable,” Fall said. “You wouldn’t think that he would hurt a flea.”
Dwight Coleman once called the pastor asking for prayer for his emphysema. And he used his skills as a carpenter to help make renovations at the church’s camp, Faw said.
But he could never wean himself off the wine.
Marie Coleman’s pastor and family are convinced that was a factor when Dwight Coleman sat across the table in the kitchen — decorated in country fashion with knick knacks, pictures of animals and a framed sign that says “God Bless This House” — and shot his wife.
When Marie Coleman called her pastor Monday night, she was trying to work things out but said his drinking had gone too far again.
“She told me ‘He’s gotten mean,’ ” Faw said. “I told her at that time, she could only take so much ... I think she was getting ready to leave.”
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