“I’m fine,” she said, but her quivering hands said otherwise as she lowered her weapon.

With blood pooling against the platform and dumbfounded commuters watching in shocked disbelief, Mann and Smithson walked slowly to the body.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” he asked without looking at her.

She was quiet for a few moments, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t betray her fear. Then she remembered the information she’d gathered on the suspect’s psychological profile.

“The mindset of a man who’d kill for drugs is the same as one who’s suicidal,” she said, masking her raging nerves with her matter-of-fact tone. “When he raised that gun, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill himself.”

An hour after the shooting, a disheveled Mike Coletti walked into homicide and sat behind his scarred metal desk. His mind racing with the news of Father O’Reilly’s impending execution, he loosened his tie while drinking coffee from an old cracked cup.

The steaming brew was part of a morning ritual that he’d observed for the past thirty-one years. On days like this one, it helped him to quiet his mind and remember what was truly important, just the way it used to do for his father.

Even now, more than three decades after his father’s death, the detective still remembered him clearly. A no-nonsense butcher who migrated to South Philly from Naples, Italy, Michelangelo Coletti, Sr., would begin each morning with a cup of his wife Gloria’s freshly brewed espresso. He’d leave the house at sunrise to open his Ninth Street shop and butcher meat until well after dark to provide a good living for his wife and his only son, whose name they shortened to Michael.

The Colettis were simple people with an abiding sense of pride in their heritage and a core set of values that came from their native land. Honor and tradition, family and respect were enforced with Michelangelo’s iron fist, encouraged by Gloria’s velvet glove, and reiterated every Sunday at mass.

But even with all he learned at home and at church, the streets of South Philly taught young Michael the most. Living near the Italian Market, where blocks of rickety shacks brimmed with meats and cheeses and where hucksters sold everything from fresh milk to ice, he learned the value of hard work early on. However, there was a flip side to the neighborhood.

There were men who lived just blocks from his home who twisted the values of honor, family, and loyalty, and applied them to lives of crime. These mobsters convinced boys he’d grown up with to abandon childhood games in order to join South Philly’s Mafia.

Michael resisted that temptation, graduating from South Philadelphia High School in 1968—a year that embodied all the turbulence of the sixties. Vietnam escalated. King and Kennedy were assassinated. Riots burned neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities.