Overview
- Coleman’s family announced that he died of natural causes on Sept. 23 and asked for privacy while funeral arrangements are pending.
- He served in the Texas House from 1991 until his retirement in 2022, representing Houston’s Third Ward and nearby neighborhoods for more than three decades.
- Coleman helped create Texas’s children’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1999 and served as the House’s lead writer on health and human services budgets for multiple legislative sessions.
- He directed funding and policy work on mental-health services, HIV/AIDS programs and the Medicaid 1115 transformation waiver, and he joined a federal working group on health reform.
- Coverage notes an unresolved discrepancy about his age at death across outlets while reporters and readers memorialize his local work on affordable housing, university support and criminal-justice reforms such as crisis-intervention training and elements of the Sandra Bland Act.