Larry Coner, 55, is shown in an undated photo at University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Croner was injured after attempting a backflip on June 20, 2020. He died at the hospital 10 days later.
Mental illness and drug addiction haunted Larry Coner throughout adulthood.
A homeless man, the 55-year-old had survived harrowing experiences: a pair of shootings, a bat to the head and severe injuries to his jaw. Through it all, he battled the astonishing heartache of losing his son to gun violence, the deaths of his adoptive parents, and the time he met his biological family and they dismissed him.
Besieged by paranoia, he would see and hear people who weren’t there, said his sister, Coressia Williams.
She said she could pinpoint the beginning of his downward path — to the day someone slipped PCP into his drink when he was a young man, causing him to overdose. He was never the same after that, Williams said.
"Those voices would drive him to run," lamented Williams. So although her home was open to him, "he was homeless by choice," running off to the streets.
That's where he recently encountered Keonte Jones, a 28-year-old looking for laughs on Facebook.
They came at the expense of Coner’s death, captured in a disturbing 10-minute video broadcast live on June 20.
In the video, Jones repeatedly flashed $6 — a $5 bill and a $1 bill, both crumpled -- in front of the camera, narrating how he’d convinced Coner to do a backflip in exchange for the money. Jones and a group rollicked as Coner landed two cartwheels on a grassy area near a convenience store in the 700 block of Owens Avenue, and exploded in celebration when he landed on his neck in his third attempt at a backflip. Coner lay mortally injured as the group, especially Jones, continued to laugh at what had transpired, not helping him or calling an ambulance.
Coner died 10 days later. Jones was arrested by Metro Police on a count of willful disregard of a person’s safety, a felony. He’s since bailed out from the Clark County Detention Center, pending an Sept. 14 court hearing.
Williams said she hadn’t heard from Coner for a couple of weeks before the incident. She learned that he had just been released from North Vista Hospital for an issue related to his mental health.
She said she found it plausible that he’d accept the deadly challenge, likely because he was disoriented and hungry.
Williams regularly seeks out the homeless and offers them help. "I give money to people and I don’t ask them to do tricks. I pray to them, I give them money and I wish them well." She wishes Jones would’ve done the same for her brother.
Instead, "he was a bug to you, he was a crackhead to you, he was nothing to you, he was a joke to you," Williams said, speaking of the cruelty of Jones and the others who laughed without helping. "He was my brother, my only brother, and I’m left alone because you wanted to laugh."
When the video was posted to Facebook, someone watching it recognized Coner and immediately phoned Williams, who arrived at the scene 30 minutes after the ambulance left. Someone there told her Jones was the one who approached her brother.
For the next 10 days, Coner was hospitalized at University Medical Center with paralysis from the neck down. Williams said her brother couldn’t recall what happened, and at times he couldn’t even recognize her.
But he was talking until the day he died, Williams said. There was a moment of apparent clarity when he called her the night before he died to plead for her to take him to her house. ”Did you know you were about to leave me?” Williams recalled, crying. “Were you just trying to come home to see me one more time?”
The death came as a shock to Williams, who thought he would recover, citing a successful surgery. Being a certified nursing assistant, Williams was ready to care for him at home.
Williams said she and her brother were bonded by something stronger than blood, a happy California home with their adoptive parents who took custody of them when they were babies.
Coner was three years older than Williams.
But at one point, they were introduced to their biological families. Williams’ was accepting of her, while Coner’s family wasn’t receptive to him.
Even so, Coner had a normal childhood. And before the drugs, the shootings and the severe beatings, he was thriving as an adult, having a job and acquiring a brand new candy-apple red Volkswagen.
Afterward, it was a painful experience after another. In 2008, his 17-year-old son was shot and killed in California.
His parents and Williams were the only ones who could take care of Coner when the nightmares, outbursts and night sweats appeared. "It was a lot," Williams said.
It got harder when their adoptive father died, followed by their mother’s death exactly two years before Coner’s. But Williams still tried.
When her brother would run away, she would go looking for him, to at least give him food. Sometimes he would purposely hide, but he’d also shelter at her house on occasion.
Many families have a loved one like Coner, Williams said, whether that person is suffering from a drug addiction, mental illness or has someone who’s veered off. Her brother was all three, but he was still family.
"I don’t think that in their families they think it’s funny," Williams said about the group mocking Coner the day he was fatally injured.
She said she hasn’t mustered the courage to watch the video posted by Jones, but she’s seen or heard about parts of it, noting how horrifying the narrator's laughter is to her, how he sounds like a "warlock."
She is grateful to the elderly woman who called 911, and to the women who confronted the men who mocked Coner. When Coner was hospitalized, Williams took his clothes home to wash them. The $6 wasn't in his pockets.
Coner’s death has affected her greatly. She said she couldn’t eat the first couple weeks, and she still shakes thinking about him. She still can’t sleep. “I still see my brother’s face.”
She said she will “never drive that side of town again.”
Between the painful memories, there are also positive ones — like the time when Coner, then a 9-year-old, went to the zoo with his family.
There was a gumball-type machine that would dispense goat food, Williams remembered. “Larry always had this crazy appetite, and he thought he was getting animal crackers.”
When the family realized what he’d done and told him he was eating goat food, he didn’t care. He kept eating it. The family laughed with him, not at him.
Editor's note: The family has organized a GoFundMe account for Coner's funeral.