In the summer of 2017, a young man's life was tragically cut short over a dispute about a pair of sunglasses. Victor Millan, a 25-year-old male from East Hartford, was visiting his grandmother in Hartford for the Fourth of July. On that evening, just before midnight, an argument erupted that would have fatal consequences. Millan was shot multiple times, suffering wounds to his head, neck, torso, and leg on Wadsworth Street in the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford.
He was a hardworking man with no criminal record in the city, known to his family as a dedicated father with a son and another child on the way.
The investigation into Millan's death led Hartford police to identify and apprehend two suspects. In August 2017, William Coleman, 26, of Hartford, was arrested and charged with murder, conspiracy of murder, and reckless endangerment, among other charges. He was held on a $1.5 million bond. A few months later, in November, police arrested a second suspect, 36-year-old Luis Picart Jr. Picart faced a string of charges including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and several firearm-related offenses. The motive for the shooting, according to authorities, appeared to be a senseless argument over Millan's designer eyeglasses.
In January 2020, William Coleman was brought to trial for his role in the death of Victor Millan. Testifying in his own defense, Coleman claimed that he had only fired his weapon after someone else shot first and that he had not intended to shoot Millan. The jury ultimately convicted Coleman not of murder, but of the lesser offense of first-degree manslaughter with a firearm, bringing a measure of legal closure to a case that began with a trivial disagreement and ended in a heartbreaking loss of life.
