LMPD :: Louisville Metro Police Department
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Police investigating break-in at Louis Coleman's office

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On Saturday the man still in the forefront of the civil rights movement in Louisville passed away. Reverend Louis Coleman was 64.

Then just hours after his death Coleman's headquarters for many of his groups was burglarized.

As his civil rights colleagues mourn the death of Reverend Louis Coleman, they are also outraged at a break in at the Justice Resource Center.

One of Coleman's last acts was to take guns off the street, but in the hours after his death, someone tried to get them back on the street.

Louis Coleman had not been dead nine hours when Metro Police got the call about a break-in in progress at Coleman's Justice Resource Center office at 19th and Maple.

Police called longtime JRC colleague Mattie Jones to the scene.

The guns were from Rev. Coleman's gun buyback program. Just last weekend he had collected an undetermined number off the street, intended to be destroyed. Police don't know how many - if any - guns were stolen.

Jones and her son took the guns from the scene, but later became nervous about carrying around five pistols and 17 rifles in his vehicle. So they called police.Mattie Jones says police would not take the guns, instead suggesting that she follow them to police headquarters to secure them.

She says officers pulled away - and she was never able to find them - driving downtown streets with a cache of weapons.

Metro police say Jones must have misunderstood the officer, and that he told her to go to the Second Division headquarters and not downtown.

Jones can only imagine today how Louis Coleman would react.