Three alleged gang members charged in the execution-style killing of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee are set to go to trial in April, more than three years after the fourth-grader was killed in an alley near a South Side park.
Cook County Judge Thaddeus Wilson on Wednesday set deadlines for a trial that is expected to last three weeks, with jury selection set to begin April 22.
Wilson has not ruled on a motion to choose separate sets of jurors for each of the defendants –– alleged gunman Dwright Boone-Doty and co-defendants Corey Morgan and Kevin Edwards.
Edwards’ lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Kucaba, said Wednesday that she would file a motion to have the trial held outside Cook County, citing the intense media attention focused on Tyshawn’s murder.
Prosecutors have said the 9-year-old was targeted because he was the son of a member of a rival gang that Morgan believed was behind the murder of his brother, Tracy Morgan, in an an attack that also left Morgan’s mother wounded.
Morgan allegedly told others that in retaliation for his brother’s death and the injury to his mother, he was going to “kill grandmas, mamas, kids and all.”
The trio were riding in a black SUV when they spotted Tyshawn on the basketball courts at Dawes Park in Gresham on Nov. 2, 2015. Boone-Doty lured the boy into an alley across from the park, near Tyshawn’s grandparents’ home, prosecutors have said. While jailed as a suspect in another shooting, Boone-Doty allegedly bragged to another inmate about shooting Tyshawn in the alley, and said he had considered torturing the child.
An autopsy report stated Tyshawn was shot in the head, and suffered gunshot wounds to his back and his hands, the latter “consistent with defensive wound trying to block the gunshot.”
Morgan and Edwards had been seen talking with Boone-Doty, and had been riding in a black SUV that was seen fleeing the area near the park after the shooting.
