Man who bought gun that killed Tyshawn Lee believed it wasn’t to be ‘used for something good’

When a boyhood friend from Chicago reached out to Andre Williams and asked him to buy and ship a few guns back to his hometown, Williams wasn’t much troubled by the requests.

During several stints living in New Mexico, Williams admits he mailed at least eight guns to Chicago, including the one used to kill 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee.

A little over a month before Tyshawn was killed in November 2015, Williams admitted he bought two pistols from an Albuquerque pawn shop and mailed them to a south suburban address given to him by his friend, Anthony Morgan. Thursday, Williams testified at the murder trial of Morgan’s younger brother, Corey, and alleged gunman Dwright Boone-Doty.

“I didn’t think about it. Out of sight, out of mind,” said Williams, who already has pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge for acting as a straw buyer.

“I knew they probably wasn’t being used for used for something good, but I didn’t know how serious of a situation it would become.”

Anthony Morgan earlier this year pleaded guilty to federal gun charges. Prosecutors say Corey Morgan plotted to kill Tyshawn as payback for the murder of Morgan’s brother, Tracey Morgan, just weeks before the fourth-grader was shot dead in an alley across from Dawes Park in the South Side Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Williams testified Thursday that he had known the Morgans since childhood and met Anthony while playing basketball on the court at Dawes.

The seventh day of testimony in the trial featured key testimony against Corey Morgan from yet another childhood friend. Moesha Walker, the sister of former co-defendant Kevin Edwards, said that her brother and the Morgans were close friends and fellow members of the Bang Bang Gang/Terrordome faction of the Black P-Stones. The day after Tracey Morgan was killed in a gang shooting that also wounded Morgan’s mother, Walker said she listened as her brother talked to Morgan.

“Corey said his brother had got shot up in a car with his momma, and he like, ‘They killed my brother and shot my momma,” Walker said. “He said, ‘N—-as tweaked. Everybody must die. Grandmamas, mamas, babies and all.”

The trial has played out in front of two sets of jurors, and lawyers for Boone-Doty could have barred jurors deciding Boone-Doty’s case from hearing Morgan’s alleged statement but opted to let them hear Walker’s testimony. In opening statements, Boone-Doty’s lawyers emphasized that Morgan and his surviving brothers had the strongest motive to kill Tyshawn, and also procured the murder weapon.

Morgan’s lawyer, Todd Pugh, noted on cross examination that Walker did not talk to police about what she’d heard until more than a week after the shooting, after reward money for tips in Tyshawn’s murder had grown into tens of thousands of dollars. And, in her first interview with investigators, Walker recalled Morgan announcing a slightly less-chilling list of acceptable targets for revenge.

“He said, ‘I’m gonna kill them, their grandmas mamas and all,’” Pugh said, comparing her initial statement from a detective’s report to her testimony before the grand jury, which added the word “babies” to Morgan’s statement.

“(The detective) must have left that out on his own,” Walker said.