Prosecutors in Chicago say two men on trial for murder purposefully executed a nine-year-old boy because they believed the boy’s father was a member of the rival gang they blamed for shooting one of their own members.
Corey Morgan and Kevin Edwards are on trial for the murder of Tyshawn Lee, 9, who they allegedly lured away from his home in November of 2015.
Prosecutors claim Morgan and Edwards kept a lookout while a third man, gang member Dwight Doty (pictured), took the child into an alley where Doty shot him in the head with a .40 caliber handgun.
The child, who was killed while still wearing his grade-school uniform, was targeted, prosecutors say, because the boy’s father, Pierre Stokes, was a member of the Killa Ward faction of the Gangster Disciples — a rival to the suspect’s Bang Gang/Terror Dome faction of the Black P Stones gang.
But Morgan’s attorney insists that even the state admits that Doty shot the boy, not Morgan, and that his client had no idea what Doty planned to do to the child.
However, Doty’s attorney informed the court that a member of Morgan’s family bought the gun used to kill the child because someone in the rival gang had shot another member of their family.
The war between the Black P Stones and the Gangster Disciples has already resulted in 15 shootings since 2011, according to the Chicago Police Department.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.