The Night an Obsession Ended in Death : Support for Killer of 2 Men Leaves Victims’ Family, Friends Stunned

Sam Lewis’ world was an orderly one, free of the rough edges and sudden bumps that can jar an old man.

Each day passed much like the one before. Lewis spent time clipping collard greens in his back-yard vegetable plot, and saved a couple hours for dominoes or shooting pool with the gang at a local billiards club down on Imperial Avenue. Now and again, a hunting or fishing trip broke the routine.

It was a peaceful, seamless life, one that suited the 73-year-old retired junk-car dealer just fine.

More Than a Nuisance

But there was one thing that riled Sam Lewis: The neighbors’ habit of blocking his driveway with their cars. It was more than just a nuisance. Lewis feared he would be unable to pull out his pickup should his ailing wife need to be rushed to the hospital.

This profound obsession grew ripe one night in November. Spotting a car out front, Lewis grabbed a .32-caliber revolver, marched across the street and confronted his newest neighbor, Sean Nichols. Words were exchanged. Lewis fired two shots through the screen door,

killing Nichols, 28, and a friend.

He confessed immediately to the slayings and was packed off to jail, charged with two counts of murder. But Lewis wasn’t there long. Stirred by his plight, friends united to bail him out in time for Christmas. One hundred people came to a rally. The money--from pocket change to $50 checks--poured in.

Contributors said they empathized with Lewis, an elder statesman of sorts in his Southeast San Diego neighborhood, a beleaguered area infested with gangs and dealers peddling crack. Sam Lewis was no common killer, they declared, this was a man who stood up for himself, for his rights. Wouldn’t they, too, strike back at a tormentor if pushed too far?

“They just kept on making him put up with it, kept on testing him and testing him,” said Odessa Washington, a neighbor of the Lewis family for 15 years. “You just don’t put an old man through that. You got to have some respect.”

Back Home With Wife

Now, Lewis is back at home with his wife, Bertha, passing time until his preliminary hearing, scheduled for Thursday.

Others, too, are awaiting that day--those who mourn the deaths of Lewis’ victims, Nichols and Robert Rose. Stunned by the shootings, the family and friends of the two men have watched, aghast, as the killer has emerged as a kind of urban folk hero. The groundswell of sympathy for the old man, they say, has unfairly masked the horror of what he did.

“These people are suggesting that somehow this man was justified in taking a gun and going across the street and cold-bloodedly killing two people, one of whom he shot in the back,” said Nichols’ mother, Martha Copper. “There is no excuse for this, no excuse. It’s just senseless.”

There are few homes on Gavin Street that don’t bear the scars of age and neglect. The house where Sam and Bertha Lewis live is an exception. Freshly painted in white with bright green trim, the small, boxy residence evokes thoughts of a well-scrubbed, favored child on a street where dirt seems the landscape of choice for most homeowners.

Scarcely a pebble is askew in the collage of colored gravel that carpets the Lewis’ front yard. Potted plants, evenly spaced, bloom in a row below the front windows. Inside, the place is tidy; dust seems a rare visitor.

Long-time friends of the family say the home is a reflection of its owners: “They are clean living people, clean living people,” said Johnny Watson, who owns an auto body shop and has known Lewis since 1963.

A stout, bespectacled man with close-cropped white hair and a thin mustache, Lewis moved to San Diego from a small town in Mississippi 56 years ago. Early on, he said he “helped build San Diego, working construction and driving trucks.” Later, he sandblasted the hulls of ships for the Navy.

As a middle-aged man, Lewis launched an auto recycling business. Friends recall watching him prowl the city in his powerful truck rig, plucking junked cars out of canyons and selling them to wrecking yards.

In 1978, he retired. Now, most days are spent tending the thriving vegetable garden or socializing at the Players Club, a private hall on Imperial Avenue where Lewis and a dozen fellow retirees drink coffee over dominoes, checkers or pool. Fishing at the Salton Sea remains an enduring passion, as does hunting.

‘Nice and Kind’

“Mostly I shoot rabbits and birds, out around Bakersfield or the Imperial Valley,” Lewis said in a recent interview, during which he refused to talk about the incident. He shares the fruit of his labors with neighbors and the Baptist Church his wife attends.

“He’s a nice and kind person,” said Sue Hawkins, who lives one door south of the Lewises. “He’d help me out with repairs around the house, and give me green onions, strawberries or other things from the garden.”

During the last decade, health problems began to slow him up. There was surgery to replace both hips and a collapsed left lung. High blood pressure set in; a hearing aid was needed.

A diabetic, Bertha Lewis has also fought a battle to stay well: “I’ve got everything wrong with me,” she said recently, her graying hair swept back in a neat bun. “High blood pressure, surgery on both feet, kidney problems, different things.”

It was his wife’s maladies, friends say, that made Sam Lewis so vigilant about the parking problem. He hung a sign on the chain-link gate across his driveway, aiming to discourage those who might impede his exit. He copied down license plate numbers of the violators and griped about the situation frequently, Hawkins said.

Things got worse, neighbors contend, in May, when Sean Nichols and his girlfriend, Lisa Rosenfeld, moved in across the street from Lewis. Rosenfeld said the couple, fearful that their cars would be stolen in the tough neighborhood, parked in their front yard, right alongside the house.

“We never, ever parked in front of that man’s house,” she said. “We just didn’t.”

But Washington and other neighbors said the couple had many visitors, every day. Although they had no evidence and never told police of their concerns, some residents of Gavin Street suspected drugs were being sold at the couple’s home, a charge Rosenfeld and Nichols’ family call groundless and absurd.

In any case, Lewis and others blamed the couple’s friends for the parking trouble.

“I kept thinking it was disrespectful, that, even with the man’s sign up they were disrespecting him,” Hawkins said. “My own driveway was blocked two times. I got angry. I was late for work.”

Bertha Lewis was baking desserts for Thanksgiving when her husband walked out and headed across the street at about 7:30 on the evening of Nov. 22. There was a white car blocking the driveway, and he intended to ask that it be moved. She did not see the .32-caliber revolver--one of half a dozen guns in the home--her spouse carried out the door.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Defense attorney Millie Durovic said Lewis politely asked Nichols to move the car. She said Nichols then “stood up and said, ‘Don’t get smart with me’ and yelled something to someone else about getting a gun.”

“My client thought Nichols was going to get a gun, so he shot him,” Durovic said. When Rose--who had been in a corner of the living room, out of Lewis’ view--ran toward the rear of the house, he was shot, too, Durovic said: “Mr. Lewis was afraid for his life. He thought (Rose) was going for the gun.”

Others tell a different story. Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Eichler, the prosecutor on the case, is reluctant to discuss details. But a friend present the night the men were shot provided police with an eyewitness account that conflicts with Lewis’ version.

Maria Gomez said Lewis came to the screen door with “anger in his voice,” yelling, “I’m tired of asking you . . . punks not to park in my driveway.” Nichols, Gomez recalled, stood up and told Lewis to calm down, that it was not his car but he would ask his friends to move it. When he turned to do so, Gomez said she heard a bang and watched Nichols collapse. Rose, 33, stood up in shock. He was shot seconds later, in the back.

Gomez said Lewis then turned and looked at her but walked away after she pleaded with him not to shoot.

Just two bullets were fired. A friend who was staying in a back bedroom of the home attempted to resuscitate the men, but both were declared dead when paramedics arrived.

No weapons were found in the house.

Word that Sam Lewis was in jail spread quickly, and friends wasted no time rallying to his side.

A handful of folks formed a committee, aiming to bail Lewis out in time for Christmas. Fliers announcing the Sam Lewis Support Fund were printed and passed. A fund-raiser, complete with punch, cookies and Gospel music, was held at the Women’s Civic League hall, drawing about 100 people on a rainy night. More than 30 people went to court for a bail-reduction hearing.

“I think people just figured it was a bad deal for a guy of 73, who was in poor health, to be locked up like that,” said Watson, chairman of the committee. “People knew him, they knew the type of kind, patient person he was, and they wanted to pitch in. It was like a chain reaction.”

Watson, a retired Naval petty officer, knew his old friend was morally--and legally--wrong in taking two lives. But others felt differently. Many donors painted Lewis as a rational man, understandably driven to an irrational act by fear and harassment.

“Sam Lewis only did what many of us have been on the verge of doing, but were too cowardly,” wrote one man in a letter to a local newspaper. “Sam Lewis deserves a medal.”

The case even caught the fancy of George Stallman, a downtown San Diego bail bondsman for 41 years. When Stallman read about Lewis in the newspaper, he said he “felt sorry for him” and agreed to accept just half of the $12,500 cash deposit typically required for his $125,000 bail.

‘Felt Bad for the Guy’

“I felt bad for the guy,” said Stallman, 65. “I’ve had situations where I’ve been mad enough to shoot somebody. I figure they just pushed the old man a little too far, and he took the law into his own hands.”

Durovic, Lewis’ court-appointed attorney, seconded that emotion, likening the public’s sympathy for Lewis to the outpouring of support for Bernhard Goetz, the so-called subway vigilante who recently began serving a jail term in New York.

“Here is an elderly man who is hard of hearing and has severe arthritis, and he’s living in this high-crime neighborhood filled with drugs and violence,” Durovic said. “What’s he supposed to do, lie down and wait for someone to blow him away? How long do you live in fear?”

On Dec. 22, the Sam Lewis Support Fund reached its goal and bail was posted. After shaking hands with inmates who had befriended him, Sam Lewis went home.

Martha Copper thought nothing would equal the pain she felt when word arrived that her son, Sean, had been killed. Then, she began reading the newspapers.

As Sam Lewis was seemingly glorified by an army of supporters, her son, 28, and his friend, Bob Rose, were blithely portrayed as drug-dealing low-lifes who had somehow got what they asked for.

“There was all this innuendo, all these insinuations, and it was all garbage,” said Copper, who lives with her husband, Tom, on the outskirts of Alpine. “They were making it sound like he deserved to die. And he wasn’t here to defend himself.”

One headline was particularly painful, Tom Copper recalled in a recent interview: “It said, ‘Hero or Murderer?’ Now how are we supposed to deal with that?”

The Coppers aren’t saying their son was a saint; he wasn’t. Sean, the eldest of three boys, smoked a little marijuana, but his mother said he was not a drug dealer. (A police search-warrant receipt said that unspecified “narcotics” were found in the back bedroom being used by a friend, but Sgt. Hank Olais said there was no evidence drugs were being sold.)

And, although Nichols hadn’t realized the successes his parents had hoped he might, he was “a good person” and “He didn’t do a thing to hurt that cranky old man,” his mother said.

Good Son to His Mother

“He didn’t always lead his life the way I wanted him to, but what kid does?” said Martha Copper, who married Tom, a used-car dealer, when Sean was 10. “He was sure a good son to me. He was always up here, every week, helping me out. . . . I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and he’ll be here.”

At a funeral service, Bill Nichols read a poem honoring his slain brother. It recalled good times and bad, but stressed the man’s unswerving commitment to his family. Friends and relatives remembered Nichols as a shy person who could laugh about life.

In Martha Copper’s mind, she sees a vision of Sean working on cars, perennially hunched over the engine of his beloved Volkswagen.

Nichols was recovering from an industrial accident when he and Rosenfeld, his girlfriend of four years, moved into the Gavin Street house at the urging of her father, who owned the property. In exchange for free rent, the couple was renovating the dilapidated home--retiling the kitchen floor, painting, hanging new doors.

The pair also helped Virgil Rosenfeld upgrade the 33 other homes he owns in the Southeast San Diego area, and Sean frequently assisted Tom Copper with his car business. Weekends were spent camping in the mountains, or riding dune buggies in the desert. At the time of Nichols’ death, the couple was trying to start a family.

Despite its reputation, the Gavin Street neighborhood didn’t worry the new arrivals. Most people on the block seemed friendly. The couple frequently had friends visit, but there were no complaints. And Sam Lewis never said a word about the parking problem to the couple, Rosenfeld said.

“The only thing I really remember about him was that he was real unsociable and wouldn’t wave back at me,” Rosenfeld, 27, said.

The night of Nov. 22 was much like any other at the couple’s home--friends were over, socializing. About 7 p.m., Rosenfeld left to pick up some groceries, intending to make quesadillas. When she returned, police had surrounded the house. A friend stood in the driveway, holding her dog.

“When I left, Sean was in a real good mood because we had just finished hanging our new back door,” Rosenfeld recalled. “Then, I get home a half hour later and find some crazy old man just came across the street and killed them.”

According to Rosenfeld, Rose, 33, was a new acquaintance, a friend they had known less than a month. His relatives could not be reached for comment.

The orderly life--the gardening, the dominoes, the fishing--has resumed for Sam Lewis. But, as the days before his court date dwindle, his spirits sag.

“We’re just passing time, just getting by,” Bertha Lewis said. “It’s hard, it’s really hard.”

Indeed. If a jury sees fit, Sam Lewis, who apparently never had so much as a parking ticket during his first 72 years, could spend his waning years in prison. The prosecutor, for one, figures that’s about what he deserves.

“By all appearances, Mr. Lewis was upset about a parking spot, grabbed a gun, crossed the street, and shot two people,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Eichler said. “He clearly initiated the confrontation. He went over to their home, stood outside the door, and fired the gun.”

But defense attorney Durovic paints a different portrait. She will argue that Lewis believed there was drug dealing going on in that house, that he believed there were weapons, that he was afraid. She will argue that Lewis acted in self-defense--figuring he would lose his life that night unless he opened fire.

Both sides agree the facts in the case are fairly straightforward. The task of the jury likely will be to evaluate what Lewis perceived when he stood outside his neighbors’ door--and whether that perception made his actions justifiable.

“I think you have to stand in his shoes to understand this,” Durovic said. “You have to imagine what it would be like to be 73, to have arthritis and not move real well, to be hard of hearing. You have to realize that his threshold for feeling threatened is going to be much lower than the average person’s.

“Sam Lewis doesn’t have a bad bone in his body. I hope the jury realizes that. Because, let’s face it: For a man his age, any prison time is a death sentence.”