Cook County prosecutors Wednesday put on their final witness in the trial of two men charged with the murder of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee, closing out 12 days of testimony with heart-rending images of the fourth-grader’s autopsy.
Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar spent about a half hour on the witness stand, reviewing the wounds suffered by Tyshawn in the 2015 shooting. The fatal gunshot struck the boy in the right temple.
More chilling injuries were smaller marks on Tyshawn’s face made by bullet that Arunkumar said might have fragmented when it stuck his thumb — nearly severing it — as he tried to shield his face. Those wounds also showed flecks of gunpowder that indicated they had been fired from just a few feet away.
“One explanation [for the fragment wounds] could be the bullet went through the thumb and there was fragmentation of the bullet,” Arunkumar said.
Jurors showed little visible reaction as Arunkumar pointed to photographs of Tyshawn on a monitor screen. A group of high school students, who sat down just after Arunkumar took the witness stand, also seemed impassive. Lawyers for co-defendants Dwright Boone-Doty and Corey Morgan had no questions for the medical examiner, and the defense is expected to begin their case Wednesday afternoon.
Prosecutors have said Tyshawn was killed in an alley near his grandmother’s house, after Boone-Doty lured him from a nearby South Side park. The motive for killing Tyshawn was revenge against the boy’s father, Pierre Stokes, purportedly a leader in a rival gang that was behind a shooting a few weeks earlier that killed Morgan’s brother and wounded his mother.
