CHICAGO _ Corey Morgan may not have fired the bullets that killed 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee, but he had the motive to help orchestrate the revenge slaying, a Cook County prosecutor said Thursday as closing arguments got underway in the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
"What's the thing that drives this case? Who is it? It's this defendant, Corey Morgan, his desire for others to hurt the way he hurt," said Assistant State's Attorney Craig Engebretson, calling Morgan the "connective tissue" among the three charged in the slaying.
Morgan, 31, and co-defendant Dwright Doty, 25, have been on trial for nearly three weeks on charges they executed Tyshawn in November 2015 because his father was a ranking member of the gang suspected of shooting Morgan's brother and mother just weeks earlier.
"This is so unbelievably personal," Engebretson said. "It's his mom. His mom gets shot. Mom's not out there gangbanging. But she ends up getting shot, so the response has to be proportionate."
Engebretson then quoted a witness who testified she overheard Morgan say that nobody was off limits: "Grandmothers, mothers, kids and all."
The jury deciding Morgan's fate began deliberations early Thursday afternoon. The separate jury deciding the fate of Doty, the accused gunman, was to begin its own deliberations after closing arguments concluded.
Prosecutors allege that Doty won Tyshawn's trust at a playground in Dawes Park, dribbling his basketball, before luring the boy into a nearby alley and shooting him multiple times at close range, execution-style as Morgan looked on from a black SUV with Kevin Edwards, who pleaded guilty before trial to first-degree murder.
Prosecutors made much of secret jailhouse conversations in which Doty bragged about Tyshawn's slaying.
"I'm talking at him, we walking," Doty could be heard saying on the recordings, some of which were played again for jurors during closing arguments. "Pop! Into the ground, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop ... I'm laughing."
His attorneys argued that Doty, slimly built, was simply bragging to puff up himself in Cook County Jail's threatening environment, especially given that Demetrius Murry, the inmate wearing the wire, stood 6-foot-5 and weighed nearly 300 pounds.
"Justice does not mean convicting the wrong person," said Danita Ivory, an assistant public defender representing Doty. "Justice does not mean convicting someone because they're 21 years old ... and they find themselves in Cook County Jail weighing 150 pounds, 5-feet-9 inches tall, surrounded by people the likes of Demetrius Murry."
Earlier Thursday, prosecutor Engebretson tallied the evidence he said points to Morgan's guilt: the three eyewitnesses who put him in the park around the time of the attack, the GPS data that shows the alleged getaway vehicle driving from his girlfriend's house to the park and back again on the day of the shooting, the data recovered from his cellphone showing a user looked at Facebook pages for Tyshawn's parents in the hours after the shooting.
"He wants to know: 'Are they hurting? Are they hurting like I hurt?' " the prosecutor said.
In addition, another Morgan brother trafficked the gun used in the shooting, Engebretson pointed out.
More importantly, he said, a witness testified she heard Morgan vow revenge.
"He said he was going to do it!" the prosecutor said. "Let's not forget that. Let's not bury the lead. He said he was going to do it. He's the one with motive."
Engebretson also played video from the witnesses picking out Morgan in photo arrays in an attempt to show the care that Chicago police detectives had taken to ensure the identifications were done fairly.
But an attorney for Morgan hit hard at what he called weaknesses in the eyewitness identifications, arguing that police didn't follow proper procedures when they compiled lineups and photo arrays for eyewitnesses who were in the park on the day of the shooting.
In his closing argument, attorney Todd Pugh pointed out that one key witness testified that police had shown him photos at some point before he identified the suspects in a more formal photo array video-recorded by detectives and shown to jurors. That would be a highly improper move, Morgan's attorney told jurors.
Police in the early phases of the investigation were "trying to shoehorn the evidence a little bit in a certain direction," Pugh said. "This was a horrific crime, and they wanted to solve it _ and they wanted to solve it quickly."
Morgan made sense as a suspect, Pugh said, but prosecutors have no evidence that he even knew Tyshawn was the son of a rival gang member before the day of the killing.
"He was a gangbanger," Pugh said, "His brother was murdered on Oct. 13, his mother was shot. ... They say there is an inference that the killing of Tyshawn Lee ... was because of the killing of Tracey Morgan, but there's no direct evidence of it."
Once police locked on to Morgan, they stopped considering other avenues of investigation, Pugh said, including looking into the other people whose DNA was linked to the car or those who fled the scene when the murder weapon was recovered some 18 months after the killing.
"You know if Corey was somebody different the investigation was never going to be tilted like this," said Pugh, who acknowledged Morgan was a gang member. " ... He, in the eyes of the police, is one of those throwaway people."
Despite the emotional nature of the case and jurors' possible distaste for Morgan, Pugh urged them to consider the evidence skeptically.
"You don't have to like Corey Morgan. You don't have to like where he ... came from," he said. " ... But you can't find him guilty based on the evidence they've shown you in this case."
In rebuttal, Assistant State's Attorney Patrick Waller hit back at Pugh's "throwaway" line.
"You know who was thrown away by this defendant and his compatriots? Whose 9-year-old body was left in the alley? Tyshawn Lee. They threw his life away," he told jurors.
