Karma came walking up on Jamon Coleman one day with pistols in hand, the only kind of moment that ever scared his son. Jonah Coleman ducked behind his father’s legs as five men surrounded them, and Jamon pushed him back there because he tried to teach his son to stay close for safety. But Jamon’s heart pumped sheer adrenaline, because there was no safety here. Not in Stockton, California. Not with what he’d done.
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Jonah was too young, then, to truly understand. He was old enough to see. To internalize. His father was once a self-described “young menace to society,” a longtime gang member with the Bloods in South Stockton trying to rid himself of his past. But the reaper kept knocking at Jamon’s door, and winking at his son.
“Just because I walked away from it,” Jamon once told his mother, “doesn’t mean people have forgotten what I’ve done when I was a part of it.”
So Jamon pulled up to Stribley Park this day wearing all black, with no trace of red except a splash across his Nikes. The park sat on the east side of town, across lines and into blue-affiliated territory. He was there, simply, to pick up Jonah from football practice, who was then playing with the East Stockton Yellowjackets. Jamon had no rag. He had no gun tucked in his waistband. The Crips at the park that recognized him, though, had guns tucked in theirs.
They approached, and Jamon lifted up his shirt. No weapon, he told them. No malice. No violence. He bowed down. It wouldn’t have worked, perhaps, if Jamon didn’t point to Jonah peeking from behind his legs.
“My son’s right here,” Jamon recalled telling them. “He’s playing football. I’m trying to teach him something different.”
The group cooled, eventually, because of the fleet-footed boy who was drawing whispers in Stockton.
“That’s your son?” the group asked.
He was. Over the years to come, Jonah grew into the pride of Stockton, and Jamon cheered for him in stadium stands alongside men who would’ve once wanted him dead. Subsequent run-ins cooled. Jamon drew hints of his son’s halo. And a son gradually became something more to his father.
“That was his miracle child,” said Trent Washington, a pastor in Stockton and longtime family friend.
Jamon Coleman now believes Jonah Coleman saved his life, in one way or another. It took his son’s rise in football for his father to fully pull away from gang ties, even as his skin is still pockmarked with bullet scars that may never fully fade. And in return, Jamon dedicated much of his life to protecting the son and the gift that saved him.
Years after his dad’s reformation, Jonah sits on a bench at the Broncos’ practice facility in Dove Valley, gazing out at the green expanse of his future. He has run all the way from Stockton to Arizona, to Washington, and to Denver, a fourth-round rookie running back who can play a major role in the Broncos’ shot at a Super Bowl.
And if he runs far enough in Denver, Jonah hopes the force of his steps can ripple back to Stockton and shake the same generational forces that he helped his own father escape.
“Stockton is tough, man,” Jonah said Wednesday during the team’s minicamp. “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in whatever the hell is going on around you.
“A lot of people set this ceiling, like, right here,” he gestures, raising his hand to chest level, “instead of trying to shoot past the stars. You know what I mean? And for me, I wanted to shoot past the stars.”
A breeding ground for gang activity
Marcella Johnson was showing plenty during her brief stint in San Joaquin County Jail in 2003, several months pregnant at the time. She was struggling to make ends meet while taking care of her dying mother, and was booked on welfare fraud for not properly reporting income from one of her jobs, she said.
And she’d coo to the boy in her stomach, as he’d jostle around.
“Hold on, guy,” she’d say, munching on some fruit. “We’re going to be out of this real quick. Eat this orange. Eat this apple.”
Shortly after his mom got out of prison, Jonah Coleman was born, already knowing what it felt like to want out.
He began walking at 7 months old, Jamon said. When his father took him to the toy store, little Jonah eschewed trucks and toy weapons in favor of a ball. The neighborhood kids on Stockton’s south side would gather for rowdy games of tackle football in front of Jamon’s apartment building, and one day Jamon saw Jonah toddling around with them, the smallest kid around.
Jamon saw his son get popped hard a couple times. Jonah started crying.
“I was like, ‘OK, well, he’s done,’” Jamon recalled. “He’s going to come in the house now.”
Jonah pulled up his shirt, wiped his face, and kept on playing.
Eventually, young Jonah went to stay with his mother for a time on the south side of Stockton after Marcella and Jamon separated amicably. He would come bursting into the house, sweating from running in the California sun, and Marcella used to ask her son why he smelled like a wet dog. He did not stop. He went to Stribley Park one day to find the Yellowjackets practicing and tried hopping into conditioning drills — unsuccessfully — without paying any fee or obtaining written approval from his parents.
He got it, eventually. And thus triggered environmental forces that Jonah could see, but took years to fully understand. Washington’s son Tyrei became best friends with Jonah while both played for the Yellowjackets, and the pastor remembers the area around the park in East Stockton seeing gunfire yearly. Shooting drills, Washington called them.
The team had a chant, Washington remembered. Call-and-response.
“Who are we?”
“East Side!”
Washington always noted, from seeing years of kids come through the Yellowjackets and get caught up in gang activity, that the call was actually referring to the territory, not the team mascot.
“To me, it was a breeding ground,” Washington said. “‘Where you from? East Side’ … when you start saying that, you’re poisoning their mind, and you’re influencing – ‘East Side. East Side.’”
In a team meeting this week, the Broncos held a conversation about domestic violence and how it can be passed down through generations, Jonah told The Post. The 22-year-old said his mind drifted back to his own beginnings, in Stockton, on that concept of general generational trauma.
“Like, as far as the gangbanging, the way how people act, the way how people move, all that stuff is passed down, from generations,” Jonah said. “It’s kinda like what you go outside and see, everything as a kid — you can’t really talk or anything yet. The most you can do is see. Like, you see things. You see before you can talk. So when you’re a kid, that’s all you see.”
His father, before him, saw.
‘I want you to be way better’
Before he became a pastor at Victory In Praise Church in Stockton, Washington knew gang life, too. So did everyone in Stockton who’s watched Coleman grow up, in one way or another. The Crips and Bloods reached the apex of their Stockton influence in the 1980s and 1990s, Washington recalled, as the concept of fast money dawned along with the crack cocaine epidemic.
Once, Washington went to a party in the Nightingale Avenue area in southeast Stockton, later known as the birthplace of the Everybody Killa (EBK) gang. As Washington remembers, a man got shot in the foot. He limped down the street, retrieved a gun from the trunk of his car, and started shooting up the party in return. Washington scrambled to the roof, where a friend’s cousin pulled out her own gun and shot.
It jammed. The bullet shot into her own stomach. Washington and “associates,” as he put it, rushed the girl to the hospital.
“You would think, at that time, common sense would tell you to go home,” Washington said.
They went to another party.
“Those moments — did that stop me from going clubbing or being in a gang, or dealing drugs?” Washington said. “No. That stopped nobody.”
That, certainly, didn’t stop Jamon Coleman. His own father wasn’t in his life while he was growing up. His family eventually explained to him that his dad was a pimp. Attention, instead, came from the array of faces he’d pass on the way to the store and on the corner, gang members beckoning with brotherhood. They sensed he was fearless. He accepted an initiation ritual of sorts that involved breaking his ribs and sending him to the hospital, to build trust that he wouldn’t turn to police if a situation got violent.
“There’s no secrets to what his dad went through,” said Nate Howard, Jonah’s eventual high school coach at Lincoln High.
Bullets flew through Jamon’s life, and wove directly into the start of Jonah’s. Jamon rattled off: he has been shot in his side, and his groin, and his leg twice, and his back, and his head. When Jonah was 3, sound asleep in his room at his older sister’s birthday party, bullets from an assault rifle cracked through the windows of Jamon’s house and left holes above his bed. When Jonah was a few years older, riding his bike, he watched as a car pulled up next to Jamon and occupants shot his father several times.
Jonah sprinted towards Jamon, crying, as his father laid on the ground leaking blood. In that moment, Jamon told his youngest son to promise him to never pick up a rag in his life.
“I don’t want you to be like me,” father told son. “I want you to be way better.”
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Slowly, though, Jamon’s son began to help him heal, from a life thrust upon him. On another occasion, Jamon got shot after going to a party with Marcella. The bullet hit close to his spine, leaving his legs numb. Jamon, for a time, was in a wheelchair, hoping he’d eventually be able to walk again.
One day, a young Jonah — lively as ever — jumped knee-first onto his father’s lap, in the wheelchair. Jamon pushed his son off him.
“What did you do that for?” Jamon recalled telling his son. “That hurt!”
Jonah looked back at him, shocked. Quiet.
“Dad,” Jonah asked, “you can feel your legs?”
Jamon started crying.
‘If you don’t love the process, you won’t last long.’
In Washington’s eyes, this particular Stockton life is an addiction. To material things, sure. But an addiction to attention. To reputation. A hit so powerful, indeed, that it dulls one’s own innate sense of self-preservation.
Even still, as cracks of pain spread through Jamon’s voice when discussing his past, hints of pride drip through.
“It just became a part of me,” Jamon said.
Eventually, though, that piece of Jamon could no longer coexist with the size of his son’s ambition. Around 9 or 10 years old, Jamon brought Jonah to trainer Vince Carter, a Stockton native who has since helped mentor several future NFL players. Immediately, Carter recalled, he could tell Jonah “wanted different.”
“He was not OK with how the generations were before him,” Carter said. “Like, he really wanted to change.”
Jamon went to his associates on the south side, and told them he couldn’t run with them anymore. He went to older enemies on the east side, and told them he’d be crossing territories solely to watch Jonah play with the Yellowjackets. East-side Crips began to ignore Jamon in favor of telling his son “good game” and to “put on for the 209.” Friends watched as Jamon got a house for himself and his children, and removed himself from the street corners he used to frequent.
“I told Jonah, ‘Some of this stuff is only possible because of you,’ Jamon said. “I was like, ‘Man, you changed Dad’s life so much, man. And I appreciate you. So I’m going to make sure that — there’s going to make some days that you’re going to be upset with me, but I’m going to push you to the limit.’”
In the summers, Jonah would strap on a football helmet and a 25-pound weighted vest and run up a 5-mile hill carrying a football, three days a week. Jamon would putter behind him slowly in his car, drinking lemonade and blasting the air conditioner. At the summit, he’d make Jonah take off the vest and run back down with the football.
If he dropped it, Jamon told his son, he’d have to start all over again.
“It was just hell, man,” Jonah told The Post in May. “You got to love the process. And I loved every bit of it. If you don’t love the process, you won’t last long.”
Kids that Jonah and friend Tyrei Washington grew up playing with on the Yellowjackets, as the elder Washington remembered, got caught up in gang activity and left football. They had friends both affiliated with the Flyboys and EBK, two of the most prevalent gangs in Stockton. But Jonah never accepted plenty of welcoming hands despite rubbing elbows in such crowds, and Jamon hardly let his son leave the house, least of all for a party.
And over time, as Jonah became a star running back who once ran for 30 touchdowns his sophomore year at Lincoln High in Stockton, Jamon found himself barbecuing and playing dominoes with some South Stockton members who had gradually become friends.
“They saved each other,” Johnson said. “Jonah saved his dad, and ‘Mon kept him out of the streets and kept him out of the negativity that was going on out here. So I would just say, it made ‘em both grow.”
A tone-setter and a leader
After Jonah ran for 1,053 yards as a junior at Washington in 2024 — transferring there to follow head coach Jedd Fisch and running backs coach Scottie Graham from Arizona — Jamon’s phone buzzed incessantly with calls from programs trying to not-so-subtly persuade his son to hit the transfer portal again. They bandied about potential NIL offers of up to $2 million as incentives, Jamon said.
It would’ve been roughly $400,000 to $500,000 more than Washington could pay him, as Fisch told The Post. Eventually, though, Jonah simply told his father to stop answering any more calls. He wanted to graduate in four years, which would’ve been made more complex by transferring again.
And he didn’t want the fast money.
“He was kind of like the poster child of players,” Fisch told The Post, “that we wanted to promote within our program.”
At a younger age, Jonah made a promise to his late grandmother that he’d graduate college. At one practice during the fall of 2024, Washington’s assistant athletic director of football academics Diamond Brown was standing on the sideline when Jonah bounded up to her in full pads and begun complaining about his grade in a music class.
Brown replied that his overall GPA was at a 3.9, as she remembered.
“That’s B.S.,” Jonah retorted. He resolved to talk to his music teacher. He wanted a 4.0.
He finished with a 3.94, good enough to land himself as a 2025 finalist for college football’s William V. Campbell trophy, honoring the nation’s premier student-athlete. Last week, he flew back to Washington for his graduation. It fulfilled his promise to his grandmother. It also fulfilled a personal goal for Stockton.
“Give kids hope that they don’t have to be a gangbanger, they don’t have to be a drug dealer, they don’t even have to be a football player,” Jonah told The Post. “They don’t have to do nothing. You can go to college, and get your college degree. And just because you came from Stockton don’t mean that you can’t do that. You can still do that. Just being able to change a generation, ultimately.”
Such a platform, of course, will come foremost from Sundays in Denver. Jonah led the Big Ten in touchdowns (17) in 2025, and finished his college career averaging 5.5 yards per carry. His supplementary skills mesh directly with necessary running-back responsibilities in Sean Payton’s offense; the running back is an “elite pass-protector,” as Fisch said, and has had a heavy workload in Broncos summer practices catching passes out of the backfield.
As the Broncos have placed a premium on drafting and acquiring players who specifically fit their ideals around leadership and IQ in the locker room, Jonah’s intangibles stood out, too. Broncos general manager George Paton is a close friend of Fisch, and the Washington head coach gave a glowing evaluation.
“He’s an alpha,” Paton told The Post on Jonah, after the draft. “He’s a tone-setter. He’s a leader. Jedd says that he’s one of the best players he’s ever coached.”
It is all apparent in the way the 220-pound Jonah carries a football, molded by following Jamon’s bumper up a hill.
“That’s why you see him running so angry at times, running over people,” Washington said. “It’s like, ‘I got somewhere to go. Somewhere to be. And it’s not in Stockton.’”
A father’s goal
In late April, Marcella Johnson and her family loaded four cars, each with five people, and caravanned the seven-hour drive from Stockton to San Diego for Jonah’s NFL Draft party. No one involved wanted to host it specifically in Stockton.
“We (didn’t) want, running to some store to get some ice or something, something to happen,” Jamon said.
After the Broncos drafted him in the fourth round in late April, Jonah didn’t return to Stockton through the team’s offseason program. That was by design. In his first couple of years returning from college, Marcella said, her son would stay at a hotel in a surrounding area around Stockton like Manteca, California, rather than sleep at one of his parents’ homes. And he often visits preacher Washington’s house first before heading home to Jamon’s.
“He knows there’s nothing out here that’s good,” said Rob Alcazar, a friend of Jamon’s and Jonah’s former 7-on-7 coach.
In time, of course, Coleman’s family hopes he’ll return to Stockton consistently and set up youth camps, similar to Stockton native and longtime NFL receiver Brandin Cooks. For now, though, he wants to move his father away. Jamon has left the past behind, but danger still lurks. Shortly after he was drafted, Jonah called his dad in May and asked if it would alleviate stress if he got him out of Stockton.
In response, Jamon told his son that he didn’t owe him anything.
“I’m not one of those parents that’s like, ‘Oh, my son’s in the NFL, so now he owes me a house. He owes me a car,’” Jamon told The Post. “No, I’ll drive my same car and I’ll live in my same house, if I have to. My goal and my gift was to see him make it.
“If I walk outside and I drop dead on my way to heaven, or wherever I’m going, I can say, ‘Yeah, my son made it.’”
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