Tarel Coleman: Unbridled and
Unabashed
Firefighter
Tarel Coleman's friends, co-workers and football
teammates called him "Prozac." Not because he took the
mood-balancing drug, but because sometimes he needed to
calm down a little.
While many people have a childhood story involving
matches, Firefighter Coleman's firebug past cost him some
hair. At 5, he stuck his head into the incinerator in his
family's apartment building in Queens. "We didn't notice
anything," Firefighter Coleman's brother, John Coleman
Jr., also a firefighter, "until we got upstairs and saw
that he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes and no
hairline."
His chattiness and high-strung curiosity were viewed
as charm by his friends. Whenever he prepared a lasagna
dinner for his mother, Laurel Jackson, in her Jamaica,
Queens, home, she would just watch her son patiently,
with her head propped on her hand. "You couldn't stop
him," she said. "You had to sit there and listen."
Firefighter Coleman, 32, had an intensity that was
viewed with dread by his team's opponents and by the
referees of the league games he played for the Fire
Department.
Everyone knew, after all, that he did not suffer bad
calls gladly.
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