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ST. LOUIS — It was at least the fourth time Demesha Coleman had called 911 that night.

As she stood outside a north city gas station telling a dispatcher her Hyundai was stolen, two men lay shot and dying a few feet away. And a 16-year-old boy was shot in the head, clinging to life.

“My car was stolen from my house, and I chased it here,� Coleman told a city dispatcher.

Late Friday afternoon, a city jury found Coleman guilty of first-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action in the shooting death of Darius Jackson, 19, who was in the car. She was not convicted in the shooting death of Joseph Farrar, 49, an innocent bystander. The jury found her not guilty on six counts that included first-degree murder, first-degree assault, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

This week, attorneys spent hours dissecting surveillance videos, playing her 911 calls and interviewing witnesses in front of a St. Louis jury. The case hinged on one main point: Was Coleman acting in self defense? Or was she the aggressor?

Prosecutors charged Coleman with murder hours after her Tucson SUV was stolen one winter night more than two years ago from the driveway of her Spanish Lake home.

Her car was one of 1,621 stolen Kias and Hyundais that year in St. Louis County during the peak of astronomically high theft rates of those cars. A viral TikTok video showed how to break into and drive off in many models of the South Korean-made vehicles, using just a screwdriver and a USB charging cable.

But Coleman had a magnetic GPS device on the bottom of her Hyundai.

And after it was stolen that night, she tracked down the car, 5 miles from her home. She ran up to it, the thieves still inside. And she was armed.

“Unbeknownst to anyone on that lot that night, something was about to happen that would forever change their lives,� special prosecutor Terrence O’Toole Jr. told jurors.

Gunfire erupted as soon as the car doors swung open.

Defense attorney Issac Dodd said Coleman, now 37, acted in self-defense. He blamed the situation on a “litany of state failures� by police before the shooting.

“This case is about the state repeatedly failing Demesha and then turning around and putting the blame on Demesha,� he said at trial.

Prosecutors said the opposite. For them, this was about a series of choices made by Coleman, who could have stayed at home and waited for police to respond.

“This was not a mistake,� O’Toole said. “All of this happened when she decided to arm herself.�

‘Get out of my car!’

Coleman, who owned an at-home senior health care business, got home a little after 9 p.m. on Dec. 21, 2022, and went outside about 30 minutes later to put a steering wheel lock on her grey Hyundai Tucson and bring her GPS tracker inside to charge — her car’s windows had been busted two times that month already.

But she went outside to an empty driveway.

She called 911 at 9:43 p.m. and told police she was tracking the stolen car’s movement — it was at Larimore Park in Spanish Lake. A dispatcher said officers would come to her home to take a report.

Coleman called 911 again to tell police the car was parked outside a home on Spanish Boulevard. She dialed 911 a third time to tell them the car was headed into the city. The dispatcher then told her she’d have to contact city police.

Her 19-year-old son, Tavion Alexander, drove her to the city, so she could call 911 and reach a city dispatcher.

Instead, they followed her car. At this point, it was almost at the Speedie Gas station — now VP Racing Fuels — near North Broadway Street and Riverview Boulevard in the city’s Baden neighborhood.

The Tucson turned into the gas station. Seconds later, Coleman pulled in after them.

But Coleman brought help. A second car pulled in to the gas station after Coleman. A man — only identified in court as “JJ� — got out of that car and motioned to Coleman to follow him to the Tucson.

Gas station security cameras and a police camera across the street caught what happened next:

The thieves parked the stolen Tucson feet from the store’s front door. A masked man got out of the driver seat and went inside.

Coleman and JJ ran around the gas pumps and up to the Tucson. Coleman came up to the passenger side, JJ the driver side.

They opened up the front doors simultaneously with guns drawn and pointed.

“Get out of my car!� Coleman yelled, she testified in court.

Returning to the scene

A split second later, gunfire erupted. It was 10:25 p.m.

Coleman, Coleman’s son and JJ all fired at the Tucson. Then all three ran away from the SUV, Coleman tripping and falling multiple times as she ran.

At about the same time, two people in the Tucson jumped out from the backseat and ran off, too.

Corion Murphy, 16, didn’t. He was in the backseat, shot in his hand and just above his right eyebrow. He crawled out of the backseat, head first, stumbled to the street corner, then collapsed.

On the witness stand this week, his speech slurred, he repeated several times he couldn’t remember the night of the shooting or anything before that. An ER doctor testified that he had the most serious kind of traumatic brain injury.

Jackson, the teen who died, was in the front of the Tucson when Coleman and JJ threw open the doors. He fell out of the car in the seconds after the confrontation, but still fired off about 10 shots while laying on the ground, according to ballistic evidence. Then his body went still.

Farrar, the bystander, was outside the store when the shots rang out. One bullet hit him in his forearm, another in the right side of his abdomen. He fell to his knees, leaned against a concrete barrier next to a gas pump, put his forearm on the barrier, rested his head on his forearm and died in that position.

The driver of the Tucson, who was in the store, walked out after the shooting, saw Jackson and Murphy, and kept walking.

An off-duty St. Louis police sergeant working secondary across the street at an event center heard the shots. He walked over to where he could see the gas station, but said in court he didn’t see anything, and went back to his post.

Coleman returned to the lot and made her 911 call at 10:28 p.m. Video footage does not show her checking on the three people who had been shot.

Almost two dozen shots

A man inside the gas station’s store called 911 at 10:32 p.m. — seven minutes after the shots rang out. Officers arrived 11 minutes after that.

Coleman was cooperative and handcuffed soon after.

O’Toole, the prosecutor, told jurors her story continued to change that night as she found out what police knew.

At first she said she was alone and didn’t draw her gun. Then she said she had her gun but didn’t fire. Eventually, she told police one of her accomplices was her son.

To this day, Coleman said she cannot remember firing her gun.

The one thing that hasn’t changed, her defense attorney emphasized: she repeatedly told police that when she opened that car door there was a gun in her face.

“I just remember running off and falling,� Coleman testified. “And then I remember hearing my son say, ‘Mom, you gotta get up. Get up. Get up.’�

Coleman’s son was listed as a defendant with his mom in a grand jury indictment filed in August, but he does not appear to be charged separately in court filings. As of this week, police still haven’t found her son.

Coleman — who has been in custody since that night — said on Thursday she wasn’t sure where he is.

Ballistic evidence gave the final toll of the night: Jackson’s gun, recovered at the scene, shot 10 rounds. A Glock in the Tucson fired off two shots.

Ten other shots were attributed to the guns fired by Coleman, her son and JJ. Those guns were never found.

Coleman, it appeared, fired no more than twice.

“None of this makes any sense,� Dodd said in his closing statement. “She had no criminal history. She’s not a cold-blooded murderer. She’s a freaking soccer mom. She made a horrible decision that night, I’m not denying that. But it was a lawful one.�

O’Toole disagreed. He said Coleman couldn’t claim self defense because she was the initial aggressor.

“Whatever you think of the investigation, that was after all her decisions that brought us here today,� he said.

During the sentencing portion of the trial, several of Farrar’s sisters spoke. They said he was a kind and loving person who knew everybody, and everybody he knew loved him.

And they lamented that no one stopped to help him while he was dying on the gas station lot. They also pointed out that Coleman’s conviction was for Darius Jackson’s death.

“None of your guilty verdicts were about my brother, it’s like he doesn’t even exist,� his sister Michelle Jackson said to the jury.

O’Toole, the special prosecutor, asked the jury to sentence Coleman to a total of 15 years in prison.

Coleman’s lawyer asked for six years, three for each count.

The jury deliberated for about 50 minutes Friday evening before recommending a sentence of 13 years: four years for armed criminal action and nine years for manslaughter.

Coleman has served about 27 months while in pretrial custody.

Circuit Judge Madeline Connolly will impose a sentence. By law, she can sentence Coleman to less time than the jury recommended but not more.