Pressures, problems filled Coe's final months

Meanwhile, the medical examiner officially rules the state attorney's death a suicide.

By DAVID KARP, GRAHAM BRINK and AMY HERDY

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 15, 2000

TAMPA -- For 38 years, Harry Lee Coe could turn to close friend Deanna Easterling, his judicial assistant and human resource director, for support.

The two had endured so much together that when Coe asked Easterling for a $5,000 loan last year, she gave him the money without question.

"It was like a husband-and-wife relationship," she said Friday.

But in the past four months, Coe and Easterling had hardly spoken except for official business.

It was one of many things Coe was dealing with in the months leading up to his suicide this week.

Gov. Jeb Bush had ordered an investigation into Coe's loans from Easterling and another employee, a development that created intense media scrutiny and renewed rumors of a gambling addiction. He had recently attended his niece's funeral, and faced a tough re-election fight from two challengers.

His body was found Thursday after he shot himself under the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway, a few hundred yards from his apartment.

Friday, the medical examiner's office officially declared the death a suicide.

The .38-caliber revolver was touching the forehead just above the left eyebrow when the shot was fired. "We didn't find any signs of foul play," Dick Bailey, a spokesman for the medical examiner's office, said.

The time of death could not be determined beyond sometime after dark Wednesday and before sunrise. A TV reporter and photographer looking for Coe at his nearby Bay Oaks apartment complex found the body just before 11:30 a.m.

The findings suggest that Coe's lifeless body sat for hours propped against a concrete pillar under the Selmon Expressway near the busy MacDill Avenue and Bay to Bay Boulevard intersection. Passers-by may have mistaken the body for a sleeping homeless man.

Bay Oaks resident Leon Podurgiel said he did not notice anything unusual Wednesday night as he strolled within 20 feet of the area where Coe's body was later found. After meeting with friends, he returned home much later, and again noticed nothing amiss.

"I didn't see anything, and I walked right by," Podurgiel said.

Some residents, however, thought they heard what sounded like a gunshot between 9 and 10 Wednesday night.

Times editorial assistant Suzanne Scruggs said she jumped when she heard a loud bang as she walked along the Bayshore sea wall near Bay to Bay Boulevard about 9:45 p.m. Several nearby strangers stopped and commented that the bang sounded like gunfire, she said.

"I've got second-hand accounts from several people who reported hearing what they thought were gunshots about that time," said Dr. Lee Miller, assistant medical examiner. "It's plausible."

Coe left a note at his apartment, written long before the suicide, requesting his family cremate him and forgo a funeral service.

By Friday afternoon, passers-by visiting throughout the day had tucked roses and handwritten notes into the vines that encircled the cement pillar. One read, "Harry, go to God good man."

"It just keeps drawing me back," said Jennifer Dietz, who stopped by after work. Dietz, a 35-year-old lawyer, remembered arguing cases in front of Coe when he was a judge.

"I wish he had gotten help," she said.

So did Deanna Easterling, who said she "loved Harry to the very, very end."

The two were going through what Easterling described as a "a down cycle" in the relationship. But the disagreement wasn't over the loan.

It was over Coe's decision to support Ben Wacksman, a fellow Democrat, in a race for the Hillsborough County Commission this fall against Easterling's only daughter, Stacey, a Republican.

Stacey Easterling, 30, left her job as a prosecutor in Coe's office in March to run against Wacksman. When she made the decision, Coe came to her mother to say it wasn't a good idea.

"I didn't like that," Deanna Easterling said. "I don't hold my kids back. I support my kids in whatever they do."

Easterling met Coe when she was 19. She was a court reporter; he was a prosecutor. After Coe was appointed to the bench in 1970, he hired Easterling as his judicial assistant.

In Hillsborough's close-knit courthouse, the closest people to many judges are their assistants. Easterling had seen Coe through two divorces, the birth of his three children and tough re-election fights.

After being elected state attorney, Coe hired her as his human resource director.

Earlier this year, Easterling's daughter announced her plans to challenge Wacksman. Coe didn't mind if Stacey ran as a Democrat, Deanna Easterling said, but he soured when he learned she was a Republican.

Both Deanna and Stacey Easterling said they understood that political loyalties required Coe to support Wacksman.

Then in late April, Coe gave a speech praising Wacksman at a political picnic at MacFarlane Park. It wasn't an explicit endorsement, but Deanne Easterling took it that way. "I considered it that way. Yes. I did," she said.

If Coe didn't intend the speech as an endorsement, he must have understood its implications.

"One of my standard lines (to candidates) is try not to get involved in other races," said GOP businessman Sam Rashid, who said he backed Coe's re-election campaign.

Rashid, who is Deanna Easterling's next-door neighbor in Valrico, has been actively working on Stacey's campaign.

Neither Stacey Easterling nor her mother Deanna ever talked to Coe about his support of Wacksman.

No one knows how much the fallout bothered Coe. Coe's son, Harry Lee Coe IV, declined to comment on the subject Friday.

"It's just not that important at this time," he said.

About two days ago, Coe spoke to Deanna Easterling for the first time in months about something other than business. It seemed like they had made up.

"Toward the end, it seemed to be all right," she said.

The last two days have been miserable for Easterling. "I don't have any more tears," she said.

Coe services

An open visitation is planned for 6-8 p.m. Tuesday at the Living Water Church at 6850 Living Water Place, off Interstate 4, west of Orient Road in Tampa. On Wednesday, a funeral will be held at 10 a.m. at Living Water Church. Afterward, a procession including a police escort will travel to the intersection of Bayshore and Gandy boulevards for a reception for family and friends at St. John's Episcopal Church at 902 S Orleans Ave. in Tampa.

- Staff writers Joe Humphrey and Sue Carlton contributed to this report.

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