Family to Bury Teen as Suspect Goes to Court

As 17-year-old Leonard Anthony Coppola’s family lays him to rest today, the man accused of shooting him begins the legal process that will determine whether the apparent case of mistaken identity was also a case of justifiable homicide.

Edward Nishida Drake, 50, is to be arraigned this morning on murder charges that stem from the Friday night shooting at his Simi Valley automotive shop.

Police have tentatively ruled that Drake mistook Leonard for a burglar as the boy fumbled with a padlocked gate near Drake’s shop.

But Lt. Neal Rein said the courts will have to decide whether Drake was justified to use deadly force, or guilty of charges as serious as second-degree murder.

“Realistically, the defense of property is never any justification for deadly force,” Rein said. “Yourself or someone else has to be in imminent fear of death or great bodily injury.”

Drake knew Leonard, who had once worked at a motorcycle shop next door. There is no indication the pair had any long-standing feud or problems, and it appears Drake did not know who he was firing at, although they were barely 15 feet apart, Rein said.

Detectives are still working on the case.

Drake’s blood indicated he had been drinking, but full toxicology studies are still being done, Rein said. “But it was a low level of intoxication, not nearly the level where he’d be categorized as drunk.”

As for the gun itself, Rein said that anyone can keep a registered gun at home or a place of business for self-protection, but must learn to use it responsibly.

On Monday, friends of Leonard’s remembered the Simi Valley High School dropout for his generosity and his fondness for motorcycles.

They said little about the way he died. “A fluke,” one called it. “A tragedy,” said another.

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Instead, they recalled the quiet teenager who had made himself a second home in Simi Valley’s dirt-bike community as comfortable hanging out with guys twice his age as he was vaulting moguls in the dust off Tierra Rejada.

Gary Eisenhower, 17, said Leonard started out as a mild rider who showed real promise--so much so that Leonard eventually taught him how to jump double-downhill humps, clear a table-top jump and handle a heavier dirt bike.

He also remembered the humor Leonard showed after the inevitable crashes they would have on neighborhood dirt tracks in Simi.

“He was always about laughing, getting back up on it and doing it again,” Gary recalled Monday. “That’s how riders are. If they get hurt, they get back up and see if they can do it better the next time.”

Leonard had had minor motor vehicle code violations such as driving without a license, records show.

He was attempting to earn adult education credits after having dropped out of Simi Valley High, said Pete Hensley, who hired the youth to work at KH Performance Cycles and Watercraft.

Hensley met Leonard four or five years ago. “He was friends with the neighbor kids where we used to live,” Hensley said. “He used to come in and watch me working on stuff, and that’s probably how he got into it. That’s why I hired him.”

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Hensley set the boy to work cleaning up the shop, then began training him to repair motorcycles. Leonard went to work on construction jobs with his father a few months ago, but he sometimes returned to hang out at the shop and went riding with the crowd from KH, Hensley said.

“It seems he’d rather come down and try to hang out with us than go hang out with his other buddies, tooling around and partying,” Hensley said. “We used to joke around with him, play around making fun of him, and he’d do the same to us.”

Gary and Leonard were hanging around the shop Friday afternoon, Gary recalled. Just before they left, Drake gave the boys 4 pounds of hamburger and a pair of steaks from his own freezer for their camping trip.

The boys returned about 9 p.m. to pick up the trailer that would carry their dirt bikes from Gary’s house on the weekend trip to Hungry Valley Recreation Area.

Leonard fumbled with the combination padlock on the gate, Hensley said. “Leonard didn’t know the combination to the gate, because it had been changed recently,” he said. “Gary told him it had been changed, and he’d be right there to open it for him. It probably wasn’t even a total of 30 seconds to a minute” before Drake fired, he said.

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Drake had decided to sleep at his shop next door to wait for a contractor to arrive early the next morning, Hensley said. He kept a pistol “because in the past he’s had some burglaries and people breaking in over there.”

Drake fired the .44-caliber revolver once, hitting Leonard in the head, police said.

“It was like a fluke thing,” Gary recalled. “When Ed realized what happened--I really can’t remember. I’m still in shock. Leonard’s a really great kid.”

Drake “is a nice guy,” Hensley said.

Drake was described as a generous and outgoing, if solitary, man by Donna Seibel and her husband, Joe, who have been neighbors of the antique-automobile expert for the last two years.

The couple said that Drake, the son of a Japanese mother and Jewish father who said he was raised on an Israeli kibbutz, had been living illegally aboard his 38-foot sailboat named Draken about five nights a week at a Channel Islands Harbor dock since he separated from his wife.

Drake had few visitors and lived alone with a six-toed black cat named Shadow that he found as a stray hanging around his Simi Valley shop, the couple said. Drake would leave large tips after his weekly meals at the harbor’s Tugs Restaurant, where Donna works as a waitress, she said.

“He seemed like a lonely guy who just wanted to be your best friend,” Joe said, adding that the Vietnam veteran loved barbecuing steak and would join them for dinner about once a week. “That [cat] was the apple of his eye.”

The couple, who say they plan to visit Drake in jail today, are in shock that their friend could be implicated in the fatal shooting. They said Drake enjoyed a few beers and was almost impossible to awaken once he had fallen asleep, which he used to do regularly about 8:30 p.m.

“I really just believe this was a real freak thing,” Donna said. “If it hadn’t been this young boy, it could’ve been somebody else if he was awakened out of a deep sleep.”

Mack Reed is a Times staff writer and Nick Green is a correspondent.