Where ‘Hot’ Coats Attract Cold-Blooded Killers : Crime: A shearling jacket is this year’s ticket to trouble on the streets of New York.

The young men drove up in a shiny black Jeep with mirror-coated windows and oversized tires.

They double-parked on Flatbush Avenue and bounded into La Caribe, the nearest clothing store.

“Shearling!” Raymond Soldan, 17, barked at the proprietor, Kamal Singh. “You got it?” Singh nodded wearily and pointed to a wall covered with coats.

In New York City this is the year of the fleece-lined shearling jacket. Last year, the triple-stuffed goose-down parka was in vogue. Before that it was pump sneakers and gold chains. Earlier, it was bomber jackets, designer sunglasses.

Status-conscious teen-agers are nothing new, here or anywhere. In some neighborhoods, however, shearling jackets now turn heads not because they are so fashionable, but because they have become an invitation to death.

This winter at least 16 youths have been shot for a shearling coat or one of an equally popular style with a multicolored leather eight ball on the back. Six of them died and several others were been gravely injured.

“I wouldn’t even sell them now,” said Howard Smith, who runs a men’s store on Flatbush Avenue a block from Erasmus Hall High School. “You have them in the store, it just means more people are going to come in and rob you. Why make life worse than it is?”

The crimes of New York often shock people in other cities because they seem so random. When a woman with $1 in her wallet died in an encounter with a purse snatcher in the subway recently, the incident made headlines largely because it seemed it could have happened to anyone.

There has been nothing random about the shootings for overcoats, however. Recently, Quan Horton, 16, of Bushwick, wore one to a party. On his way home, according to police, he was challenged for the jacket. When he stood his ground, he was shot.

“These coats are cool,” said Johnnie Wardell, 16, a student at Erasmus Hall, sporting a classic, three-quarter-length sheepskin coat. “It says you got class, and you don’t care who knows it.”

Talk about letting clothes wear the man.

Prodded by friends to assert their emerging manhood or eager to cash in on a commodity that can keep an addict in drugs for days, some teen-agers will do anything to acquire a shearling--$450 worth of butter-soft leather and lamb’s wool.

The sight of a shearling coat is as likely to provoke combat in certain neighborhoods here as would the wrong gang’s colors in some sections of Los Angeles.

One of the recent victims, Jamel Hollis, 16, was shot in the hand in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn after being confronted by about 10 young men. Hollis, no fool, shed his coat the minute he saw the gang approaching and was about to go home. One of them shot him anyway.

“These people have no real sense of community values,” said one social studies teacher at Erasmus Hall, who asked that his name not be used. “They see things on television and they want them. This is a city that swims with merchandise and where possessions are important.

“So if they don’t have the money to buy the coats, they steal them. I have kids here who don’t want to hang up their overcoats in our closets or lockers because they wouldn’t last a day.”

Police have a hard time advising people on the coat problem, in part because police have bigger problems every day in every part of the city. Many New Yorkers wear expensive clothing, and most know that, next year, people will get killed over another hot item--a cashmere sweater, a locket or a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

It is perhaps for that reason that the Board of Education declined to ban shearlings from city high schools, although it has been discussed. If the school system banned every piece of merchandise that a youngster could be killed for, many students would have to leave for school naked.

“You trying to figure out why they shooting for the winter coats, Man?” asked D. J. David, who sells specially mixed tapes of rap and reggae music on the steps of a church on Flatbush Avenue.

“Don’t even waste your time,” he said. “They shoot people for anything. If you got nothing and one of these monsters has a gun, then they shoot you for nothing. The coats are nice, man, real nice, but these guys don’t even notice.”