“My Son Is Just As Important”

Outside the courtroom from where the Petit murder trial was taking place, Victoria Coward had her own murder story to tell. She knocked on the windows of three TV vans to try to tell it.

Coward’s son Tyler was shot to death at the Edgewood Park sundial at the age of 18. Like Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley and Michaela in Cheshire, Tyler was killed in 2007.

As with the Cheshire case, the proceedings for Tyler’s accused murder took place earlier this month at the Connecticut Superior Court on Church Street. It was the first day of November, and the defense had just rested its case in the trial of Steven Hayes, who would later be sentenced to death in the Petit killings.

In a small courtroom, away from the crowds, Jose Fuentes Pillich took a plea deal that will land him over 25 years in prison for killing Tyler Coward.

Pillich, a 25-year-old who moved to New Haven from Puerto Rico, was originally charged with murder and illegal gun possession. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: first-degree manslaughter with a firearm. He agreed to a 40-year sentence, suspended after 30 years, plus three years of probation. He will be eligible for parole after 25 1/2 years, according to his attorney, public defender Joseph Lopez.

Tyler was Coward’s first-born, and her only son. She showed up for the hearing with other members of her family. The week before, prosecutor Stacey Haupt had already explained the proposed punishment. Coward said that while she didn’t like it — she wanted Pillich to be at least in his 60s when he emerges from prison — she supported the move.

Coward (in photo at the top of the story) said she didn’t wish the death penalty on her son’s killer. She wouldn’t want any family to go through what she went through in losing a son.

“I just want him to be in jail,” she said, ​“to do what he has to do.”

In court, she waited for half an hour on a short bench across from the defendant’s supporters until a translator showed up. Pillich (whose name is also spelled ​“Phillich” in court records) had already confessed to the killing, according to police. He has been held on a $3 million bond since his arrest on July 6, 2009. Pillich took the plea guilty plea as planned.

Outside court, Coward and Tyler’s father came across several news stations covering the Cheshire case. Networks came from far and wide to cover what was a national story. She went up to one news van and knocked on the glass of the door.

“Yo, you want some news?” she told the TV crew, she recalled. She told them she was the family of the murder victim from the Edgewood sundial. She said no one took any interest. She tried again at two more vans, to no avail.

Coward said she called all three TV stations the week prior to give them a heads up, as they had covered the case in the past. That day and the next morning, as the Cheshire case grabbed the headlines, her son’s murder went unmentioned on screen and in print (including, it should be noted, online in the New Haven Independent).

She took away a message: The media wanted to talk to a murder victim’s family, but ​“we’re not the right one.”

Coward concluded that when black New Haveners die by gun violence, it is not seen as newsworthy.

“How do you treat these homicides in this way, like they’re supposed to happen?” she asked. ​“These people are dead!”

“You gotta tell me I’ve gotta live in the suburbs?” Coward asked. ​“Murder is murder. My son is just as important as the Petit family.”

Coward said she and her son (pictured) were very close. As a teenager, Tyler towered over her at 6 feet 5 inches tall and 214 pounds. Coward, who’s 49, stands at 5 foot 6. She said he used to take her hand in his and joke about how small it looked. Because of her size, Tyler affectionately called his mom ​“Peanut.”

“He was a gentle giant,” Coward said in a recent interview at her Sherman Avenue home. She sat on her living room couch wearing an oversized T‑shirt with her son’s face and the letters R.I.P.

As she spoke, her blue-nose pit bull, Dynasty, barked at the back door. Despite her bark, Dynasty is really a ​“chicken” who seeks love and attention, she said. Coward bought her two years ago, after her son’s death left an emptiness in the home.

Coward’s face lit up as she told stories of her son, often in the present tense, as though he were still alive. She said Tyler’s father, whom she divorced, is an ​“off and on drug addict.” That left Tyler to step into a protective role in the home.

Coward has lupus, and has trouble with her joints and her foot. One time, she fell in the shower and hurt her side. When she yelled out in pain, her son ran up the stairs to help.

With his long legs, Tyler made it up the stairway in three single bounds, she said. ​“He swooped me up. ​‘Mom, are you OK?’”

Even throughout his teenage years, Tyler played the drums at his family church on Lawrence Street, according to his mom. She would play the organ, as Tyler’s two sisters would sang in the choir. The St. James Unity Holiness Church is led by Victoria’s father, Arlester Coward, who’s now 93 years old. Victoria said the family moved to New Haven from Rocky Hill to be close to her father.

Outside of church, Victoria Coward said, her son got mixed up with the wrong crowd. She said Tyler’s problems began when he started attending Hillhouse High School. He started trying to sell marijuana to try to fit in. He served a week in juvenile jail on a misdemeanor charge. He jumped in to break up a fist fight at school and nearly got expelled as a result.

At the time before his death, she said, Tyler had ​“turned his life around.” He enrolled at adult education. He would ride his bicycle there, then hang it in a tree behind the building so that no one would steal it during class. He was studying to get his driver’s license so that his mom wouldn’t have to drive him around so much. He was due to start a new job at UPS on Friday, just three days after he died. Tyler told his mom he had left life on the streets.

Coward said she could tell her son had changed his ways when she went shopping for him shortly before he died. She was downtown, and she wanted to pick him up some T‑shirts in his size, 6X. She recalled that some kids wear only certain colors to represent their allegiance to neighborhood gangs. She called up her son and asked what color she should get.

“Any color you like,” he replied. She was pleased with the answer.

“I bought him every color,” she said — dark blue, light blue, red, yellow, even purple.

Tyler wasn’t completely free from street violence, however.

For about a month before he died, Tyler was ​“looking over his back,” she said. She believes he knew someone was after him. During the week before he died, Tyler was playing cards at home with his sister and dad. He got up several times from the table to peer out the window and see if anyone was there, she said. Coward said her son didn’t give her details on what kind of trouble may await him, but he did drop hints by citing his grandpa’s words of wisdom.

“Granddaddy was right: Not everybody is your friend,” he remarked one morning, as he waited for an early morning ride to a job interview. He sat slouched over, holding his head in his hands. He showed a few rare tears.

“What goes around, comes around,” he offered on another day.

Pillich, who went by the nickname ​“Philly,” was a friend of Tyler, according to his mom. She later learned that the two had intended to settle some kind of dispute. They went to Edgewood Park for ​“a fair one,” a one-on-one fist fight.

Coward said before Tyler headed to the park that evening, he called his grandpa to say, ​“I love you.”

The two apparently did fight with their fists: Pillich’s DNA was found under Tyler’s fingernail, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Then Pillich pulled a gun, which was later recovered in the possession of a friend. That man, who would be sent to jail on a gun charge, told police that Pillich had asked to borrow his gun to settle a score with a large ​“Moreno,” a black person. The friend told police the dispute was over drug dealing. He told police he was at the park on the night of the shooting, but claimed he was busy loading a cigar with marijuana and didn’t see the shots fired.

Tyler was shot at least four times, twice in the chest and twice in the head. A neighbor reported seeing him cross the Boulevard and lie down on the sidewalk. He bled into a new, dark blue T‑shirt — one the ones his mom had bought for him. Twice, Tyler lifted up his torso and made a phone call.

Cell phone records show he was dialing ​“Peanut,” according to his mom.

She said detectives later asked her who ​“Peanut” was.

“I am,” she replied.

Coward said she was sleeping and missed her son’s final call. It took two years before she could forgive herself for that.

Instead, she woke up to a ​“bam, bam, bam” at her front door. A police detective announced there had been a shooting. ​“Your son is dead.”

Pillich was identified early on as the triggerman, but he eluded police for over two years. Police detectives revisiting the cold case ran his name through a database and found he had been picked up on a domestic violence charge in Harrisburg, Penn. They met him in court with a warrant to take his DNA. Based on DNA from Tyler’s fingernail and from a baseball hat, police charged Pillich on July 6, 2009 with Tyler’s murder. (Click here for a story on how the cops cracked the case.)

“It was the best day of my life,” said Coward.

Pillich is due to be sentenced on Dec. 21.

Coward said the defendant, who’s 5 foot 6 inches, looked ​“fragile” when she saw him in court.

“I have a little pity for him,” she said. ​“He’s got to think about my son every day.”

For her own part, Coward will be thinking of her son — and sometimes even spotting him on the street, for a second, when she glimpses a young man with a hat, a head taller than those around him.

“I still haven’t accepted it,” she said. ​“It’s like he went away, and he’s gonna come back, but I don’t know when.”