A few minutes before 5 a.m. on October 15, 1989, two Black men entered the Circle K gas station and convenience store on Lamar Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Twenty-eight-year-old Stella Oakes was the clerk on duty. Her boyfriend, 19-year-old Ricky Coleman, was there helping her, as he frequently did.
Minutes earlier, Oakes and Coleman had seen the men loitering by the outdoor pay telephone as Oakes swept up the parking lot. When Oakes and Colemen went inside the store, the two men followed.
One man asked about orange juice. As the second man went to the rear of the store to get the juice, the first man drew a pistol and shot Coleman in the face. The second man then returned to the front and put a bottle of juice on the counter. Oakes handed the key to the cash register to the first man, who handed it back. She used it to open the register, which contained $20, and stepped back. The second man then began taking the money from the register. The two men then began to argue with each other because one of them had pushed the button on the time-lock cash controller behind the counter, meaning it would only dispense 10 $1 bills.
As Oakes moved to where Coleman was lying on the floor, the gunman shot her twice, once in the abdomen and once in the back. Both men then fled.
Police and paramedics arrived within minutes. Oakes and Coleman were seriously injured, but both survived. Oakes was left paralyzed from the chest down. Physicians removed a portion of Coleman’s carotid artery, but did not remove the bullet which had traveled down his neck. As a result, Coleman was left with a lifelong limitation on his ability to work.
Police recovered a .32-caliber spent bullet at the scene and recovered fingerprints from the orange juice bottle, the cash controller, and the door of the cooler that housed the orange juice.
Four days later, on October 19, 1989, while still being treated for their wounds, Coleman and Oakes were married.
On October 22, 1989, Memphis police made a traffic stop of a moped at Waynoka Avenue and Holmes Street, about four miles from the Circle K. Police arrested the driver, 21-year-old Eric Wright, and his passenger and 17-year-old brother, Trell. A backpack found nearby contained a .22-caliber pistol. Although neither brother made any statement to police, an officer writing up the arrest report said that “a tip was received naming Eric Wright as one of the robbers.” Eric had prior convictions for armed robbery.
Four days later, on October 26, 1989, Oakes was shown a photographic lineup that contained a photograph of Eric Wright that had been taken in 1987. He was the only person wearing a floral Hawaiian shirt. He was not wearing denim or blue jean attire as Oakes and Coleman had described at the time.
Oakes identified Wright as the shooter and said he looked to be about 17 or 18. She said the other assailant looked younger, “about fifteen.”
Police subsequently showed Oakes a second photo lineup that contained the booking photo of Wright after the traffic stop. He looked markedly different. His hair had grown out, and he looked more mature. Oakes again identified him as the shooter.
Coleman was unable to make an identification. The prosecution agreed that Wright had been eliminated as the source of the fingerprints on the orange juice bottle. His brother, Trell, who was not charged in the case, also had been eliminated.
On October 26, 1989, Wright was charged with two counts of assault with intent to commit murder and armed robbery.
He went to trial in Shelby County Criminal Court in August 1990. Oakes identified Wright in court as the shooter. She had previously seen him in person at a preliminary hearing.
She testified that Wright was the person wearing all denim, that he was the shooter and did not touch the orange juice.. This contradicted her initial statement that the shooter was the person who remained at the counter while the other man went to the cooler. She said she was 100 percent certain that Wright was the shooter.
The prosecution presented evidence that on October 28, 1989, after Wright was charged in the case, he claimed he did not commit the crime because he was caught with a .22-caliber pistol and the weapon used in the crime was a .32-caliber pistol. The prosecutor argued that this showed Wright knew details only a perpetrator would know.
Memphis police Sergeant C.L. Engstrom testified that the caliber of the bullet recovered was not known by officers “until late in the investigation.” However, a police report showed the bullet had been identified as being .32-caliber on October 27, 1989, the day before Wright allegedly made the statement. Sergeant Engstrom also testified, however, that Wright said, “The police officers were talking about it and told me that [Oakes] was shot with a .32.”
Wright did not testify. His attorney called several witnesses. Hosey Maxwell, who was dating Wright’s sister, Gloria Beard, testified that he lived in the same apartment building as the Wrights. He said he and Gloria, along with Wright and others, including Wright’s fiancée, Bridget Hawkins, went to Beale Street on the evening of October 14, 1989. They returned home around 2:30 or 3 a.m. Maxwell said Wright was wearing black pants and a white shirt with an eagle on the back. During cross-examination, he admitted that the apartments were about a 10-minute drive from the Circle K and that he did not see Wright from about 3 a.m. until 10 a.m. Sunday, October 15, which was the morning of the shooting.
Beard testified that she went to Beale Street with Wright, Maxwell, and others. She said they arrived home at 3 a.m. and that she and Wright and other family members were in the apartment where their sister, Michelle, was living at that time.
Hawkins testified that after leaving Beale Street, she and Wright returned to her apartment where they watched television. She said Wright made himself a sandwich, and they played cards until about 5 a.m. when they went to sleep.
On August 23, 1990, the jury convicted Wright of two counts of assault with intent to commit murder and armed robbery. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in January 1992. Wright filed a post-conviction petition seeking a new trial in 2000, but it was denied because it was filed too late. He subsequently filed more challenges, but all were denied.
In December 2024, at the request of the Tennessee Innocence Project, the fingerprints from the orange juice bottle, the cash controller, and the cooler door were entered into the Automated Fingerprint Information System (AFIS) of the Memphis police department. AFIS was not available in Memphis at the time of the crime.
A potential candidate was identified as Larry Neal, who was 12 days short of age 17 at the time of the crime and was arrested nearly a year later for the robbery of a Church’s Chicken in Memphis. Five different latent prints on the orange juice bottle and the cash controller were associated with Neal.
In March 2025, attorneys for the Tennessee Innocence Project filed a motion to re-open Wright’s post-conviction proceedings and vacate Wright’s convictions. The motion noted that there was no possible explanation for a person to have touched the orange juice bottle and the cash controller except that the person was involved in the crime.
According to arrest records, the motion said, Neal and his 21-year-old brother, Sammy Neal, who worked at the chicken restaurant, robbed the restaurant with two other teenagers.
“Larry Neal Jr. had a history of violent armed robbery in south Memphis, and his fingerprints showed up on the orange juice and cash controller of the Circle K robbery,” the motion said. “Bottom line: Larry Neal Jr. was one of the two robbers of the Circle K on October 15, 1989.”
The motion said there was “zero connection” between Neal and Eric Wright.
The motion cited a report from Dr. Jeffrey Neuschatz, an expert in lineup procedures and eyewitness identifications, which concluded that a dozen indicators of potential misidentification existed, including that Oakes was white and the perpetrators were Black and that she was in a traumatic event during which she was shot twice. Other factors included the use of a photo of Wright which was distinct from others in the first photographic lineup, and that the shooter was said to be wearing a bucket hat, which obscured his hair.
The motion also said that the prosecution apparently had failed to disclose a police report of an interview with Roger Murphy, a clerk at a Cherokee Books, located less than a block from the Circle K. Murphy said two men drove up, and one came into the store, got $2 worth of quarters, and went to the back of the store for about 20 minutes, then left. According to the police report, Murphy’s description of the man who came in resembled the descriptions of the two men involved in the Circle K shooting. Murphy said he could identify the man who went inside if he looked at a lineup, but he was not shown the lineup shown to Oakes and Coleman. Murphy died in 2020.
The motion said that Wright’s trial defense attorney was deceased, “but had that information been provided in 1989, counsel could have interviewed the witness and investigated where [Memphis police] did not.”
The motion also said that the police report saying a tip had been received naming Eric Wright as one of the robbers was false. “No such tip existed; nothing in the MPD (Memphis Police Department) file indicates that anyone identified Eric Wright as one of the robbers,” the motion said.
On October 1, 2025, following an evidentiary hearing, Judge David Pool vacated Wright’s convictions and ordered a new trial.
At the hearing, Neal testified after the prosecution gave him immunity for the Circle K shooting and robbery. He acknowledged that his fingerprints were present, but said he had no memory of being there. He said his memory of those years was “cloudy” due to drug use. Asked who would have been the shooter, he said, “My brother, Randy,” who had died in 2020.
Judge Pool ruled, “This evidence, had it been known prior to trial, would have changed the course of the law enforcement investigation, leading law enforcement to investigate instead the likely perpetrators of the offense – Larry and Randy Neal.”
The judge said the fingerprint evidence was “new scientific evidence of actual innocence that Mr. Wright did not commit this crime.”
Wright was released that day. He had spent more than 35 years in prison.
On November 18, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the case.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 12-02-2025
