Hours after Tyshawn Lee was murdered, one of the men charged in his killing was looking at the Facebook pages of the 9-year-old’s parents and reading news stories about the killing, according to data taken for a cellphone that allegedly belonged to the defendant.
Expert witnesses testified Tuesday that a phone linked to Corey Morgan was in use near Dawes Park around the time Tyshawn was lured into an alley and shot in November 2015, a killing prosecutors have said was carried out in retribution for the death of Morgan’s brother a few weeks earlier at the hands of a rival gang. Morgan’s co-defendant, Dwright Boone-Doty, is charged as the gunman.
Call histories and other data had been deleted from the phone, but the search history for the device’s internet browser showed someone was looking at the Facebook page for Pierre Stokes, an alleged high-ranking member of the gang Morgan believed was behind the shooting that killed his brother and wounded his mother, Chicago Police computer forensics investigator John Clisham Jr. testified.
The browser history also showed visits to the Facebook page for other members of Stokes’ Killa Ward faction of the Gangster Disciples, as well as Tyshawn’s mother, Karla Lee, and to news stories headlined “Child fatally shot in Gresham” and “Cops: Possible slain boy targeted.”
Police also were able to pull GPS data and other information from the computer module inside the Ford Edge SUV that Morgan allegedly was riding in with Boone-Doty and getaway driver Kevin Edwards, allowing them to map the travels of the vehicle on the date of the murder and the hours that followed. Edwards pleaded guilty two weeks before the trial began.
The route tracked by the SUV’s navigation system showed the car leaving Morgan’s girlfriend’s home in south suburban Lansing, then circling the blocks near Dawes Park. Around the time Tyshawn was killed, the computer showed the vehicle parked near the alley where Tyshawn’s body was found, and that the driver and passenger door opened and closed.
The computer data tracked the SUV back to Lansing, where it remained parked for several hours before it was driven to a block in nearby Dolton, where police discovered it days later.
Morgan’s lawyer, Jon Brayman, pointed out several hours-long holes in the records created by the computer system overwriting data to conserve memory, and seemed to key in on a more obscure data point: a cellphone that had paired with the onboard computer at Dawes Park registered to a user named “Kingston.”
Prosecutors are expected to close out their case Wednesday, after nearly three weeks of testimony.
