The State - News from June 30, 1987

Acting in a case that local authorities refused to prosecute, the California attorney general’s office filed a murder charge against Joseph P. Coleman, 27, of Brownsville in the 1982 death of his girlfriend, Brenda Ferreira, 24. Agents of the State Department of Justice arrested Coleman at his home, and he was held without bail in the Yuba County Jail. Coleman took Ferreira to Oroville Medical Center, where she was found to be suffering from head injuries, in December, 1981. She was in a coma until she died four months later, and Coleman reportedly gave investigators conflicting stories about how she was injured. The Yuba County district attorney’s office declined to prosecute him in 1982 and again this year after a new investigation. The attorney general entered the case after it was featured on a segment of CBS television’s “60 Minutes” newsmagazine.