Why be cotton, when you can be leather?

Neighborhoods are dotted with low-budget memorials to murder victims, sometimes more than one to a block: spray-painted bed sheets hung across boarded-up windows and rows of empty liquor bottles lining the sidewalk in silent tributes to the dead. Loresha Gaines, now 28, was 15 and in foster care when she got pregnant with Martin. She moved in with a friend who introduced her to alcohol and marijuana. She said she was often left alone and in charge of her older friend's six children. While pregnant, Gaines said, she was beaten by drug addicts. Through it all, she talked to the baby growing inside her. Martin was his mother's best friend. He was always giving money to homeless people, even though his own family was barely scraping by, said Gaines, who is unemployed. He talked of becoming a preacher and was happy to earn spare change running errands for neighborhood elders.

His father, Michael Coleman Sr., has other children from different relationships and was in prison for much of Martin's life. He was doing time for armed robbery when his son was killed. Martin spent much of his life bouncing between the homes of his mother's and his paternal grandmother, Jackie Coleman. Jackie Coleman said the young boy never did anything worse than break his 8:45 p.m. summertime curfew. She did not realize that sometimes he was staying on the streets overnight. "We just didn't know he had gotten that far," she said.

Martin was murdered in Branch Village, the public housing complex where his maternal grandmother, Monica Gaines, spent part of her childhood. Gaines, who now lives in Tampa, Fla., doubts it's possible to grow up in Branch Village now without using or selling drugs.  "It reminds me of Sodom and Gomorrah," she said. "It will suck you in." Her cousin, Nat B. Woodward, said he tried to talk to Martin when he saw him hanging out in the projects, but the boy would not listen. He said he also called Gaines to tell her that Martin was on a dangerous path. Woodward's hunch was that the boy, then just 11, was already working for drug dealers. Authorities and some Branch Village residents say there were indications that Martin had become involved in the drug trade: Graffiti on a wall marked "his" corner.

Martin's mother and paternal grandmother said they don't think he was selling. After all, he never came home in expensive new clothes and was always asking them for a few dollars. Still, Martin's mother and grandmothers knew things were troublesome enough for Martin that they plotted to get him out of the city, at least for the summer.

Monica Gaines came for a visit in June intending to take him back to Florida with her, and Jackie Coleman had raised $500 from relatives to help Gaines feed and clothe Martin in Florida. The boy did not want to go. Just before his grandmother was to go south, Martin skipped a family meal in the suburbs and took a bus back to Camden.

Gaines said she told Martin she was worried about him, recalling her words: "Martin, please don't make Grandmom come back to New Jersey to bury you."

It's not clear how Martin spent the two days or nights before he died. His two primary caretakers thought he was with the other one. They now suspect Martin deceived them both, turning off the ringer on his grandmother's phone so his mother could not get through and grabbing the $500 in Florida trip money she kept on top of the television.  On the night Martin died, authorities said, the boy waited out evening thunderstorms in an old Oldsmobile left in a parking lot. They say friends came and went from the car that night.  Around 11 p.m., a group of people walked up to the car and someone fired an automatic rifle.

Word spread quickly. Before police got to her home to notify her, Loresha Gaines' father was banging on her door.

"Daddy, please don't tell me Martin's dead," she remembered telling him.  The day before Thanksgiving, investigators went with her as she knocked on doors in Branch Village, begging people for information. "I want someone to come forward and speak up," she said. "That's all I'm asking for, mother to mother."  Gaines clings to what she's heard on the street: The Oldsmobile had been used in a robbery, then sold, and the victim was out for revenge and opened fire not knowing who was inside. 

Acting Camden County Prosecutor Joshua Ottenberg said investigators have not ruled out that theory. Gaines said she sometimes blames herself for what happened to her son, but like so many people in her city she sees tragedy as inevitable.

"It was going to happen anyway," she said. "Because it was God's will."