Why did a former Jets wide receiver become a police officer? It starts with his heart https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6798459/2025/12/02/laveranues-coles-police-officer-nfl-jets/ The article is very long but a pretty cool read. Always liked Coles. He became a sheriff's officer at the age of 47.
That's pretty awesome. I was at a kid's birthday party years ago when my son was little and Officer Justin McCareins was there in his BSO uniform. Was a real nice guy...
Why did a former Jets wide receiver become a police officer? It starts with his heart JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A silver-and-blue badge is pinned not far from where he once wore a Gotham green Jets logo in the shape of a football. The badge reads: OFFICE OF SHERIFF The Bold New City of the South JACKSONVILLE POLICE OFFICER Where the No. 87 once was is a vest with a body camera, radio, taser gun, pepper spray and extra magazines for the Glock on his belt. Black cleats have been replaced with black, mirror-shined boots. Laveranues Coles, 47, recently completed nine months of training in the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Academy. After another month or so as a probationary officer, he will be a full-fledged policeman. Why? That’s what people who knew him — or thought they knew him — wondered. Why would someone who played 10 NFL seasons at a high enough level to catch more passes than anyone in Jets history besides Don Maynard, Wayne Chrebet and Al Toon put his life at risk? Why would a former Pro Bowler who was voted team MVP, elected a captain and won the Ed Block Courage Award invite that kind of stress? Why would someone who made $42 million in his career and was living a comfortable life since retiring 15 years ago sign up to work nights, weekends and holidays? There had to be a why, but it couldn’t be money. He’s being paid $32.92 an hour. Chad Pennington was shocked when Coles told him about his new career. He was Coles’ favorite quarterback and they’re still so close that Coles calls him his brother. Pennington chalked it up to Coles “being his own dude.” Former Jets teammate Curtis Martin texted, “Are you sure you’re OK?” Coles has been friends with actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry since his playing days. Perry has told him that he thinks he was out of his mind for becoming a policeman and that he should resign. He told him nobody likes the police and his job could be dangerous. The job, Coles acknowledges, has been challenging. It wasn’t fun showing up after some children were victims of a hit-and-run. Or dealing with a domestic battery call. To prepare for what could happen on the street, he was pepper-sprayed in the face. And tased. Not fun. When another cadet ate half of a candy bar and left the other half on the desk during training at the academy, it wasn’t fun being punished with extra running, pushups and burpees. A “yes, sir,” “no, sir” kind of guy, Coles has obediently fallen in line since his NFL rookie season, when he was expected to have Martinelli’s apple juice and made-to-order sandwiches from Coliseum Deli waiting for the veterans at their lockers when they arrived. They wanted Krispy Kremes, too, and if the hot light wasn’t on when he made the purchase, there would be trouble. But for Coles, his indoctrination to law enforcement has been a different level of submissiveness. When officers wearing red shirts or stars on their collars barked at Coles, they didn’t care that 70,000-plus had cheered him in East Rutherford, N.J., and the force of their roars made windows rattle miles away across the Hackensack River. It didn’t matter to them that he had two titanium hips and couldn’t execute an air squat, or that he was closer to 50 than 20, unlike most of the cadets. Even he has had to remind himself why.
Sixteen-year-old Sirretta Williams went into labor on Christmas 1977. And she stayed in labor. Every time doctors prepared to do a Cesarean section, her baby moved. Four days later, after hands like vise grips on the bedrails, hallucinations and passing out repeatedly, she gave birth, mercifully. It would take decades for her to understand it, but she knew then there was a purpose for that baby boy. One of the doctors, in light of the birthing struggle, joked that the baby was trouble. And so people have always called Coles “Trouble” or “Trubs.” For years, though, the world gave Coles much more trouble than he gave it. His mother says he was the embodiment of obedience and never raised his voice to her. If young Laveranues ever let a profanity slip in front of his mother, the contrite child put two hands to his chest and apologized sincerely. To his mother, he was the man of the house as well as a son, always trying to take care of her. Coles’ father was apathetic to the point of never giving his son a Christmas gift. Sirretta worked multiple jobs and relied on her mother for childcare. Together, mother and grandmother taught Coles how to find a bargain. Frugality became so ingrained in Coles that when he was riding shotgun with Jets teammate Chrebet during their NFL days, he asked Chrebet to pull over to a yard sale. “Man, we can’t be stopping at a yard sale,” Chrebet told him. “We’re in the NFL. They’ll put us on the news.” During his childhood, Coles lived in six places, including the notorious Cleveland Arms. Once, Coles heard screaming in one apartment, then the one next door, then the one next to it. A rat was making its way through the complex. Gunshots were neighborhood background noise, like honking horns and revving engines. Sirretta took the frames off their beds, so they slept beneath where they could be endangered by bullets coming through windows. The first time Coles shot a handgun was during training at the academy, but he had one held to his temple countless times before. It began when he was so young, his feet still dangled from a kitchen chair. It went on for some three years, every night or every other night. When Sirretta was working and studying to be a pastor, the man she married when Coles was 10 crept into Coles’ bedroom with that gun. “Say one word and I’ll kill your mother,” he told the boy. “Then I’ll kill you.” So Coles never spoke of it, except in his prayers. He asked God why. He begged God to make his stepfather stop. It felt as if his manhood was being taken. He was ready to fight for it at 13 when a rumor spread that he was gay. The source, it turned out, was a close friend of his who heard it from his stepfather. Coles’ hurt transformed into misplaced rage, and he beat his friend ruthlessly. It was so bad that an administrator at Highlands Middle School called the police. The officer wanted to know why Coles was so angry. Coles didn’t want to tell him, but the cop persisted. Eventually, Coles broke and admitted he was being sexually abused. His stepfather pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor. Sirretta divorced him, and he served 3 1/2 years of a nine-year sentence. During the darkest of times for Coles, football, track and basketball were his escape. But he wasn’t just playing games — he was willing himself to another place. His objective was to work harder than everyone, even unseen faces who someday could stand between him and a scholarship, a starting job or a touchdown. So when he was completely spent, Coles did 10 more jumping jacks, 10 more pushups and ran another half-mile. Not long after that fight in middle school, his feet had worn through the soles of his only pair of shoes. His mother appealed to his biological father to get their son a new pair, and his father said he would take him shopping. He had disappointed Coles many times, but Coles was always puppy-dog excited whenever his father said he would come by. He waited all day for his dad, and then the day turned to night. Finally, after the stores closed, he arrived, saying he was late because he had to clean his cars. There would be no new shoes. On the edge of his bed, Coles cried. Never, he vowed, would he count on his father for anything again, and he committed to achieve to the point that nobody in his immediate circle ever would be dependent on anyone else for a pair of shoes. At Ribault High, he excelled at everything, rushing for nearly 5,000 yards and becoming the No. 1 running back in the country, according to SuperPrep. He was the starting point guard on a state championship basketball team and, given his 3.4 grade-point average, was recruited by Ivy League schools to play basketball. Football was his thing, though, and he chose Florida State, beginning as a pre-med major while hoping to be both an NFL running back and a zoologist.
In his third year, his course was altered. A fight broke out between Sirretta and the woman who had married Coles’ father, and Coles stepped between them. He was charged with misdemeanor battery, accused of hitting his stepmother (she was charged with misdemeanor battery as well). He later served 150 hours of community service and was suspended for a game. Then he showed up for a meeting with the running backs and he was told to go next door with the wide receivers — they needed some speed to stretch the field. Coles did what a good team player does but wasn’t happy about it. There would be no opportunity to go back. He still wonders if he could have been a Hall of Fame running back. He changed majors to sports medicine, and an academic misstep led to another one-game suspension. In the fall of 1999, he and teammate Peter Warrick went shopping at Dillard’s. Coles chose three shirts, a pair of jeans and a hat. Warrick also selected a few items. The clerk at the register, a friend of Warrick’s, offered a discount. However, the discount was approximately 95 percent, the incident was caught on camera, and the football players were subsequently arrested for grand theft. The charges were later reduced to petty theft. Coles was sentenced to 10 days in a county work program, and since he was already on probation, he was kicked off the team. “Yeah, we prayed him through a lot of things,” says Sirretta, now the pastor at Lion of the Tribe of Judah Ministries in Jacksonville. Not being able to play his senior season cleared time and energy for Coles to devote himself to training. At the Florida State pro day, he ran the 40-yard dash so fast that the dozens of scouts and coaches didn’t believe their stopwatches. They asked him to run it again. Then came a similar murmur from the NFL crowd. He asked what his time was, but nobody would tell him. Instead, they asked him to run again. Coles ran a third time. They shook their heads and stared at their clocks. Finally, he was asked to run a fourth time. Then Florida State strength coach Dave Van Halanger told him he clocked between a 4.16 and a 4.21, making him one of the fastest NFL prospects in history. If NFL teams could have understood him, Coles would have been a first-round pick. Instead, he went 78th. In numerology, 8 signifies a new beginning. The number 7 represents completion. Coles chose to wear No. 87 for the Jets. Seven games into his rookie season, the Jets were trailing the Dolphins 30-7 in the fourth quarter of a Monday night game. That’s when quarterback Vinny Testaverde found Coles — or rather Miami cornerback Sam Madison — with a 30-yard pass in the corner of the end zone. But Coles tapped the ball up and out of the All-Pro’s hands, and he wrestled it away for a touchdown — the first of his career. “How did he catch that one?” ABC’s Al Michaels asked. “It went from an interception to a completion and a touchdown.” “It was probably one of those catches you make one out of 20 times,” Coles says. “I remember going to the sideline saying, ‘We got a chance to win this thing,’ and the veterans looking at me like I was crazy. ‘Shut up, rookie. You see the scoreboard?’” The touchdown sparked the comeback that’s considered the greatest in Jets history — the Monday Night Miracle. It also served notice that opposing cornerbacks had best give extra cushion and start backpedaling quickly against Coles. After a game in which he took a slant to the house against the Patriots, future Hall of Fame cornerback Ty Law told him, “I don’t know how you did that. God, you’re fast.” Yes, he could get from here to there like a pronghorn in an open savanna. But he also had the doggedness of a honey badger tearing through a beehive. Quarterback Patrick Ramsey, who threw passes to Coles when they played together for Washington, called him fearless. “When people look at Laveranues, they see his speed and playmaking ability,” says Pennington, who developed such chemistry with Coles that he could almost close his eyes and know how he would adjust a route to a coverage. “He had elite speed, but what I looked at first was his physicality and ability to always give you a chance for a completion — even if I was slightly off or in tight coverage.” With the heart of the running back he probably was supposed to be, Coles once had a streak of 19 games with at least five catches, which was never done before. He fractured his big toe in the second game of the 2003 season but didn’t tell team trainers about it until the season was almost over. Washington teammate Rod Gardner told their coach Steve Spurrier he had never seen a wide receiver work as hard as Coles. It’s no wonder Pennington cried when Coles left the Jets to sign with Washington. Three years after Coles returned to the Jets, the team cut Pennington. Coles was so upset that he refused to speak with the player they replaced Pennington with for nearly a week. The relationship with Brett Favre did not come easily. In their fourth game together, they connected for three touchdowns against the Cardinals. One of them was thrown with such velocity that Coles didn’t catch it as much as he was blasted by it, and the laces of the ball left a cut on his upper arm. By comparison, he always knew where and when Pennington’s passes would arrive, and the throws were gentle on his fingertips. During a game in Buffalo, Coles was standing next to Favre in the huddle and could hear offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer in Favre’s headset before a critical third-down red zone play. Schottenheimer told the quarterback to throw to Coles — no matter what. Coles ran his route and was wide open in the back of the end zone. He jumped and waved. The quarterback never looked at him and put the ball in the dirt, just Favre being Favre. Furious, Coles went after Favre on the sideline, intent on “putting my hands on him.” Teammates intervened. That may have been the only day in Coles’ NFL life when he was trouble. Coles and Favre played one season together and eventually became friendly enough for Favre to show up for Coles’ birthday party.
After that season, Coles signed a four-year, $27.5 million deal with the Bengals. But in Cincinnati, at 31, he realized his hands were no longer getting sweaty in anticipation of the opening kickoff. The Bengals cut him after one season and he returned to the Jets briefly. Instead of continuing to try to manufacture passion, Coles retired, went home to Jacksonville and bought bars and food trucks. He played video games and took up deejaying as a hobby. Fatherhood became a focus. During one training camp many years earlier, three former girlfriends had visited him separately. Each left with child. Coles was separated from Trillion, Landon and Taylor for much of their early lives, and in his post-football days, he was intent on seeing them come of age. Eight years ago, Coles experienced fatherhood in a different way when Zya was born. She lives with him and her mother, who is now Coles’ fiancee, and he has done things he never imagined — sitting with her in a dollhouse, playing with teacups, cooking her meals and feeling her hurts more than she does. “It’s brought out a different side of me and totally changed my life,” he says. And Zya wanted her daddy to be a policeman. She was so proud and joyful at his graduation from the academy that she cried when he walked across the stage and received his badge. She understood the why. When he was 6 and living in the Cleveland Arms, Coles began playing flag football and basketball in the Police Athletic League. Cops ran the league and engaged the kids. “It meant so much to me and I loved the officers,” he says. “I wondered what they did.” Sitting crisscross applesauce on the sidewalk, Coles looked up, enamored with every word during “Officer Friendly,” a program in which policemen parked their cars in front of his grammar school, turned on their flashing lights and made presentations. Coles isn’t sure who the policeman was who kept pressing for answers after he beat up his friend. But he knows he saved him. People in law enforcement have influenced him profoundly. When the Jets front office debated drafting Coles, head coach Al Groh made it clear he didn’t want him. He didn’t trust him. But general manager Bill Parcells overruled his coach because Steve Yarnell, a former FBI agent who was the team’s vice president of security, had investigated Coles and signed off on him. When Parcells announced the decision, he pointed to Yarnell and said, “If he screws up, it’s on you.” “It was all because Steve stood up for me,” Coles says. In his adult life, Coles lived in a neighborhood of policemen. He sponsored their basketball teams for out-of-town tournaments. Coles and Jimmie Collins had known each other since they were kids and Collins’ father sometimes gave Coles a ride home after track practice. After Coles left the NFL, he and Collins began to spend a lot of time together. Collins, who has been a police officer in Jacksonville since 1997 and is now an instructor at the academy, told Coles he would make a good cop about seven years ago. And he kept telling him. Coles saw six former NFL players, including Ernest Wilford, Leon Brown, Jeff Kopp and Victor Salako, become Jacksonville police officers. It made him think more about why. Zya lit up whenever the possibility was raised. Coles would do anything for Zya. And he would do almost anything for the people of Jacksonville. What Collins saw in Coles was a deep connection to his community and a concern for the well-being of others. He saw it in his food giveaways to hungry families, bill payments for acquaintances with empty bank accounts, weekly visits to a juvenile detention center and his funding of an incentive program for grammar school children. “To deal with people, you’ve got to have empathy and be able to put yourself in their shoes,” Collins says. “You’ve got to care about them. He’s displayed those attributes throughout his life.” Why? “It’s his heart,” his mother says. “It’s his heart.” It’s also his perspective. When he was arrested for theft, Coles heard the clang of a jail cell door behind him and was ordered to get naked, squat and cough to make sure he wasn’t hiding any contraband. Then, on the side of a highway, he picked up trash, even a tick-infested deer carcass, with people yelling out their car windows, “Hey, look, Laveranues Coles!” Coles believes everything he’s been through has prepared him to change lives. And if he can change lives, maybe he can help restore faith in an institution. To him, the opportunity is a privilege. After Pennington chuckled about Coles’ new quest, he let it settle in and realized it made sense. “Our youth needs leaders like him who have similar stories and can relate but also provide them a source of truth to say, ‘Look at my story — this doesn’t have to be this way,’” Pennington says. In his fifth NFL season, Coles publicly revealed he had been sexually abused. Some opponents glowered, elbowed him in the back and told him, “That was some f—ed up s— you did, talking about that.” Yarnell approached him one day. He said a man came to the Jets facility with a message for Coles. The man’s son admitted he was being sexually abused by his uncle, and he found the courage to reveal it only after hearing Coles’ story. “That,” Coles says, “made it all worth it for me.” Cops have different ways of dealing with their emotions. Some mask theirs behind a stone face. Others have an alter ego on the job. And some, like Coles, embrace theirs. Coles still has a neck like a Doric column and the forearms of someone who swings a sledgehammer 40 hours a week. If he chose, he could be an intimidator who de-escalates with the Brazilian jujitsu moves he learned at the academy. But he’d rather do it with a genial smile. Not long ago, Coles was called to a disturbance. A 15-year-old had argued with his mother and struck her. Coles had to apprehend and cuff him. “I felt so bad,” Coles says. But Coles saw opportunity. He explained to the boy that his mother cared deeply about him, and he needed to do better by her. His indiscretion did not have to be a defining moment, Coles told him. And he said he didn’t expect to ever see him in a similar situation again. He left the boy at the juvenile detention center, then pulled away in his squad car, knowing, without a doubt, why.
Thanks, I must have been able to view it on my one free read, I didn't get the paywall the first time.
That's really cool, good for him. I always admired his courage for talking about the sexual abuse he suffered when he was young. I'm not male and I'm not black, but being both of those things - according to him - is what made him come forward most especially. The way he explained it was that culturally, it was even more of a stigma and he became victimized all over again for talking about it. Uggghhh. Anyway, it was incredibly brave, and if he helped even one child, I can't commend him enough. Oh, before I forget, fck Zach Thomas for leveling Coles and then pointing at him and laughing at him when he was out cold on the ground. What a POS. Thomas got fined and then cried about it and appealed. He lost. Did I say fck him? Yeah, fck him.
I really like Coles. Wasn't he the kid who lunged sideways with a broken leg or some sh1t to snag a game saving pass? Plus he got screwed over in college for stealing sneakers so we got him on the cheap (his accomplice (name?) got a good talking too b/c he was a star, but Coles got cut). Good kid though
Good for Coles! Starting a police career at 47 years old, and with a very busy department, when he could probably lived most of his lifes off of the millions he made in the NFL, or go into a cushy, high paying job like broadcasting, or coaching somewhere, is very admirable. I think this speaks well of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in terms of believing in Coles' character and looking past the indiscretions of his teenage years. As a former LEO, one of the things that drove me nuts with a lot of law enforcement agencies was the holier than thou attitude towards applicants' backgrounds. A lot of departments would take a look at Coles' background and say "We don't care that you haven't been in trouble for 25+ years and had a long, successful career in the NFL; once a thief, always a thief!" Be safe out there, Officer Coles!
Peter Warrick. Coles has forever held disdain for Florida State for that and rightfully so. LC had the last laugh because he had the way better NFL career. Awesome article and great read.
Coles definitely got a better deal by going to the Jets who, at the time, were a pretty competent franchise with Parcells as head of football operations. Warrick went to the Bengals who had been a mess for about a decade at that point.
I have a memory like a razor. I was coming off of brain surgery, and I was watching the Jets opener at the Redskins (9/4/03). It was a Thurs night game. I remember it without looking it up because my surgery was on Tuesday 9/2, but to be honest, I would have remembered it, anyway. I was all kinds of fcked up and heavily medicated, and I was only able to watch the game with one eye open. Coles had been been dealt to Washington. So they're showing some of the player's faces on TV one by one, and they give a shout out to where they went to college. It's Coles' turn. He had a really belligerent face on and he went, "Laveranues Coles, HIIIGGGHH SCHOOL!!!" He yelled it like Larry Hogue, The Wild Man of 96th Street. I laughed and went, "Take it easy, buddy, ow!, my head. And just for that, your name is spelled wrong." I hope you all enjoyed my Laveranues Coles Story. All of my stories are true. No? Rats.
