On a warm afternoon on June 27 last year, San Antonio police got a “shooting in progress” call to 1016 Piedmont, a crime-plagued block of aging frame houses that East Side beat cops don’t need a computer to find.

When officers rolled up they found a young man dead on the front lawn, his shrieking mother beside him, witnesses comparing stories and a sober and cooperative shooter waiting to be arrested.

“I shot him,” said a frail and nearly-blind Nathaniel Word, then 72, as the police approached his burglar-barred house where he was born and raised.

And thus began Word’s year of harassment by neighbors, the burglarizing of his house during his three months in jail awaiting trial and the continued health and financial problems that eventually pushed him to board a bus this monthfor a 26-hour trip to Los Angeles.

Word said he had no choice but to leave his hometown even after a jury acquitted him of murder. He says he killed an admitted gang member, Anthony Ricardo “Tony” Coronado, 22, because they had argued and Word feared for his life.

“So, I’m just supposed to let people take over my property, intimidate me?” Word told officers at the scene. “Put yourself in my position. Police wasn’t gonna be with me 24-7….He just run over me, man. I’m 72 years old. I have no defense against him, hand to hand.”

Word, who walks haltingly due to a previous stroke and a brain tumor, told police where to find the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver he used, as well as two old “family” six-shooters he kept in a bedroom closet.

He had shot Coronado three times, including to the back of the head. The case seemed open-and-shut. A San Antonio Police detective was recorded on a dashboard video, jokingly telling a patrolman, “Dude, this is a gimme. Not even you can (expletive) this one up.”

But in June, after deadlocking and being sequestered for a night, a jury in state District Judge Lorina Rummel’s court reached a unanimous verdict: not guilty.

Prosecutor Josh Somers, following District Attorney Nico LaHood’s policy, would not comment. None of the jurors contacted by the Express-News returned phone messages. LaHood released a brief statement saying his office “did not believe the evidence supported a claim of self-defense.

“The defendant had refused to take responsibility for his actions and enter into a plea agreement, so the only appropriate option left to achieve justice was to proceed with trial,” the statement said.

LaHood is a former criminal defense attorney and “he’ll want to know what went wrong … and why,” said St. Mary’s University law professor Geary Reamey — but sometimes, Reamey added, “a not guilty verdict is healthy and sends a message that juries have a spine.”

Word’s acquittal follows others in recent years involving self-defense claims by Texas homeowners. But his inability to stay in his own home afterward makes his story different.

Changed neighborhood

Nathaniel Wesley Word III says his right eye is closed due to a golf ball-size pituitary tumor diagnosed in 1996. He had a stroke in 1998. He has glaucoma in the left eye and diabetes, he said.

Word’s mind works just fine. He passed a court-ordered mental competency exam. But now he uses a walker. After he got out of jail, a fall sent him to a nursing home but his $762 monthly Social Security was not enough to stay there, his attorneys say. Word lived in a Motel 6 during his trial. He has stayed with friends. His car won’t run.

He could not go back to his house. Police recorded one burglary there in the past year when someone noticed a door open, but filed no report on it. Word says looters hit the house repeatedly, taking his stove, refrigerator, TV and clothes.

“I can deal with all those physical things,” Word said. “But after my wife died in 2003 … I’ve lost everything that was emotional to me.”

The couple met at Phillis Wheatley High School, now a middle school, and had four children. They lost their oldest daughter to AIDS in 1987 — “She had a transfusion during a miscarriage,” Word said.

He said he wasn’t always poor — he worked for Western Electric in Houston and was a merchant seaman in the 1960s. He got into real estate and flipped houses before returning to San Antonio from California in 1988.

When Word was a kid, he played touch football in the middle of Piedmont Street. “But everything’s changed now,” he said wearily, slumped in a sofa in his lawyers’ office days after beating his murder rap. “They selling coke, speed, weed…”

In the past two years, police have received 77 calls to a 10-block stretch of Piedmont that includes his house — assaults or burglaries in progress, narcotics sales, thefts, robberies, fights, repeated loud music complaints, loose dogs, family violence.

“If I had to do it all over again,” Word said, describing what happened last year, “I would have called the cops before I shot somebody. My dad told me to never do anything in anger.”

‘I wanted some respect’

The man he killed, Coronado, was part of a loose group of neighborhood men. Word let them sit and drink beer in weathered plastic chairs on his front sidewalk. On that Saturday, according to police witness statements, they included Coronado, Word’s next-door neighbor Ernesto “Neto” Varela Sr., Julian Garza, Freddie Lee Robinson IV (a distant cousin of Word’s), and a fifth man who left before police arrived.

Sometimes Word, who admits to using marijuana occasionally, would join them, but lately things had become testy, he said.

“I told them to never sell dope out there,” he said — though he suspected Varela was. “And to quit urinating beside my house. … They just didn’t respect me or my property.”

When he demanded the men get off his grass and get back on the sidewalk, they ignored him or laughed, he said. Word argued with Varela and approached to within a few feet of them.

“Tony (Coronado) got between us and said, ‘You got to go through me,’” Word recalled. “I turned around to go in my house. Tony said, ‘We’re not going anywhere.’ That’s when I got my gun, inside the house. I wanted some respect. Neto (Varela) said, ‘If you call the cops, we’ve got something for you.’”

Varela, 59, has been arrested for theft, domestic violence and possession or distribution of marijuana and cocaine, resulting in both state and federal prison terms. In the two years ending July 1, police received 20 calls to Varela’s address on Piedmont for complaints ranging from alleged robbery, shooting in progress, animal violations and 13 “disturbances,” often loud music, SAPD records show.

When he returned with his .38, Word said, Coronado had taken off his shirt. At 22, he already was an ex-con. He had told Texas prison officials he had been in the Tango Orejon gang but was trying to quit. After the shooting, police would find a pair of gram baggies of cocaine in his car.

“I knew I couldn’t let Tony get near me,” Word said. “So when he come at me I fired one shot. … I didn’t think it hit him. Then he turned as fast as he could run to his car trunk (parked at the curb), which I knew was full of guns ‘cause he showed me once, and that’s when I fired the second shot. He went down, then I got closer and fired again.”

The last shot was to the head, witnesses testified. Medical examiners said it was fatal but that none of the shots were at close range.

Word said he “felt horrible for the longest time.”

“I would not have lost any sleep if I had shot Neto,” he added. “Instead I had to shoot a 22-year-old kid who still had a long life to live.”

After the acquittal, Word’s court-appointed defense team, Jeff and Kristen Mulliner, accompanied him on a visit back to his broken, boarded-up house. Word looked inside and shook his head in disgust. Varela came out of his house to have a short angry exchange, then went back inside.

By phone, Varela later said he generally got along with Word since they met in 2009, “but he’s acting all goody-two-shoes, like he’s a victim.”

“I don’t know how the jury could have accepted his story. They were a joke,” Varela said. “Everyone in the neighborhood is still shocked because he got away with murder.”

But Varela agreed that Word’s life would be in danger if he returned home. He said men he believed were associated with the Tango Orejon gang had driven by on occasion and asked if he knew where to find Word.

“I could find him if I had to,” Varela said. “But I won’t. I will leave that to God.”

Kristen Mulliner said the jurors “obviously believed it was self-defense.”

By phone from Los Angeles, Word said he is living with his son, with no intent to return.

bselcraig@express-news.net