Gunman gets 90 years for Tyshawn Lee murder, accomplice gets 65 years

The program for 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee’s 2015 funeral service. Two men convicted in his murder were sentenced to prison Wednesday. | Sun-Times Media

A Cook County judge Wednesday sentenced the man who shot 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee to 90 years in prison and handed a 65-year prison term to his co-defendant.

Dwright Boone-Doty, 25, who still faces charges in another murder case, bowed his head as Judge Thaddeus Wilson read off the sentences. Co-defendant Corey Morgan, 31, stood stoically beside his lawyers. Seated an aisle in front of State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Tyshawn’s mother, Karla Lee, wept.

Dwright Boone-Doty appears during opening statements in his trial for the murder of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee at the Leighton Criminal Court building in Chicago on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2019.

Even in a city where children are frequently caught in the crossfire of gang violence, the apparent targeted killing of Tyshawn shocked residents of the city in the fall of 2015. The boy’s body — just a few feet away from his prized basketball — was found in an alley across the street from Dawes Park in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, just a few doors down from the home where he lived with his mother and grandparents.

Prosecutors at trial argued that the fourth-grader was killed in revenge for the murder a few weeks earlier of Morgan’s brother, Tracey Morgan at the hands of members of the Killaward faction of the Gangster Disciples street gang. That shooting also injured Morgan’s mother, a transgression that Assistant State’s Attorney Thomas Darman said “poured gasoline” on the long-running the feud between Killaward and the defendants’ Bang Bang Gang faction of the Black P-Stones.

Before handing down the sentences, Wilson noted the string of back-and-forth killing that had come in the years and weeks before Tyshawn was killed, and paraphrased a remark Corey Morgan made in front of a witness about how the shooting that had claimed his brother’s life and wounded his mother had made even “grandmas, mamas, babies and all” legitimate targets in gang warfare.

“Where does this stop? Where does this mind-numbing, senseless violence stop?” Wilson said. “It stops with grandmas, mamas, and innocent children trying to play at a public park. Grandmas, mamas, kids and all are not fair game, and they matter to us.”

Corey Morgan, on trial for the murder of Tyshawn Lee, sits beside his lawyers Tuesday during opening statements at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.

In conversations recorded by a jailhouse informant, Boone-Doty described stalking Pierre Stokes — Tyshawn’s father and purported rival — and spotting Tyshawn at the park on a November afternoon. Boone-Doty said he lured the boy away from the basketball court by taking away his ball, then offering to buy him candy, luring the boy into an alley.

“I’m looking at him. We walking. Bop. Hit the ground,” Boone-Doty said, describing the shooting in one recorded conversation. “Bop-bop-bop-bop-bop. I’m laughing. I’m looking ... Bop bop bop bop bop, man.”

Boone-Doty’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Danita Ivory, had argued at trial her client’s braggadocio was not based on facts, but was just an attempt to impress the informant, a high-ranking gang member. Wednesday, she asked Wilson to consider Doty’s childhood in an impoverished, fatherless home.

Boone-Doty, who still is awaiting trial for the murder of 19-year-old Brianna Jenkins in an allegedly gang-related shooting days before Tyshawn was killed, opted not to speak before Wilson handed down the sentence. Corey Morgan also remained silent.

Karla Lee smiled as she spoke to reporters in the courthouse lobby, and said she was happy with Boone-Doty’s 90-year term, and less so with Morgan’s 65-year sentence.

Stokes was arrested in 2016 for attempted murder for allegedly opening fire on a group of people that included Corey Morgan’s girlfriend. That took place just hours after Corey Morgan and Boone-Doty were charged with Tyshawn’s murder.