Cocaine split the family, then gunshots took her husband’s life : Widow to File Suit Over Slaying

Cocaine had been a problem for David Ray Lewis since the birth of their daughter, his 24-year-old widow said Friday, an addiction so powerful that it left him broke by payday.

Finally, four months ago, it pushed Rhonda Lewis and their 13-month-old daughter Rachel out of the Westminster apartment where the couple had lived since their marriage 1 1/2 years ago.

Drug abuse also helped explain why the 24-year-old man, who held a $30,000-a-year job, would turn burglar, breaking into a gas station for a couple of hundred dollars, his wife said.

But it didn’t explain why David Ray Lewis, unarmed and trying to flee the Family Union service station, was shot from behind and killed, Rhonda Lewis said Friday, wiping away tears as Rachel sprawled across her lap in a Westminster attorney’s office. Authorities say the shooting was justifiable homicide and are not pressing charges.

“What I’d really like is to have David back,” she said after signing papers for a wrongful death civil suit, which is to be filed Monday on behalf of Rhonda and Rachel Lewis. The gas station, the gas station’s owner and the attendant who shot Lewis are named in the suit. No dollar figure is specified.

“(I’m doing this) for the awareness that you just can’t kill people and get away with it. . . . I just don’t want this to happen to someone else. It leaves a whole lot of people behind hurting,” Rhonda Lewis said.

“I don’t want her to grow up hurting,” she added, stroking her daughter’s hair. “She’s only a year old and she doesn’t talk much, but she knew who her father was. . . . He was my best friend, too . . . It’s just not right.”

Shortly after midnight on Feb. 21, as he climbed out a window he had broken at the Westminster Avenue station, Lewis was shot twice with a semiautomatic .22-caliber rifle by Michael G. Coughran, a 20-year-old gas station attendant who had been paid by his boss to sleep at the station to ward off burglars in the wake of six recent break-ins.

Authorities said the first bullet pierced Lewis in the hip; the second struck him as he bent over, traveling from his kidney to the body’s main artery. Lewis stumbled from the station to an alley, and died three hours later.

Investigators said they later learned that Lewis’ fingerprints were found from a Feb. 10 break-in at the station. They believe Lewis may have been responsible for as many as six other burglaries since last November at the station, about a block from his home.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. John Conley said his decision not to prosecute Coughran was a close call, based in part on the fact that the attendant had reason to believe he was in danger of great bodily harm or death, which by state law would justify use of deadly force. As Coughran trained the rifle on him, Lewis put his hand in his pocket at least once and made “movements” toward the attendant before fleeing, Conley said.

Saying, “I will always remember only good about David,” Rhonda Lewis disputed the idea that Lewis would threaten Coughran, saying Friday that her husband knew the attendant and other employees at the service station.

“If David was threatening him by coming towards him, why didn’t (Coughran) shoot him then? Not when his back was turned,” she said.

She said her husband often went to the facility: “If he wasn’t home, I could always find him there at the gas station . . . just hanging out.”

Coughran, who said he was not surprised to learn of the planned wrongful death suit, said Friday he did not know Lewis, did not recognize him at the time of the shooting, and only learned from his boss that the two men had met last October when the attendant worked on his car.

Conley said that even if Coughran had known Lewis, he wouldn’t have been able to see him in the station, which he said was dark except for an open refrigerator door and a light in a nearby office, and that Coughran told investigators he only vaguely remembered meeting Lewis and did not recognize him.

“It wasn’t that dark. The lights were on (the night of the shooting),” Coughran said. “I saw his face. I didn’t know him. If I’d known him then I would have told (police) who it was, and I wouldn’t have shot him.”

Coughran, whose work shift ended at 1 p.m., added, “He must have hung around at night.”

Lewis worked days, his wife said, and sometimes nights as well, as an assembler for a fitness cycle firm in Irvine. He loved his job and worked hard, sometimes even sleeping overnight there, she said. But they never had any money, Rhonda Lewis said Friday. “He never even opened a bank account because there was nothing to put in it.”

It was about the time their daughter was born, Rhonda Lewis remembered, that her husband started using cocaine.

“For the first time in his life he had to be responsible and take care of someone, and it scared him,” she said. When she asked him why, “he said all his life he’s never had to love anyone.

“What are you on?” she remembered asking her husband. “I could always tell when he was (on cocaine). He’d say just two words and I’d know. It always freaked him out.”

She called drug rehabilitation centers trying to get him help, but Lewis denied he had a cocaine problem and “thought he had it under control,” she said.

“It was hard,” she said simply. Last Thanksgiving, she left.

“You’ve just got to love them while you can,” she said with a sigh. “I didn’t want to leave him but I felt I had to to push him to do the right thing.” Both moved in with their respective parents.

“He wanted to move back into the apartment. I told him not until he was off the drugs.

“He didn’t want to lose me and Rachel . . . he’d call me and say he was messing up his life and he didn’t want to lose us,” Rhonda Lewis said. “But we’ve lost him anyway now.”

Graduates of the same class at Westminster High School, the couple met at a former classmate’s party Jan. 11, 1979. They were together from that day on, Rhonda Lewis said. They married in August, 1983.

“Right now I’m waiting for the life insurance to come through to pay for the funeral,” she said. “It’s a $25,000 policy . . . I don’t know what I’m gonna do; I don’t have any (employment) skills. I don’t want to work and have to leave (Rachel) with someone I don’t know.” For now they are living with her parents.

“Even when we were separated, we saw each other three times a week and I talked to him eight times a day on the phone,” she said of her husband. She smiled faintly. “It’s like I’m still waiting for his call.”