Police say Dwight Boone-Doty helped lure the fourth-grader into an alley with a juice box before shooting him in ‘a calculated execution to get back at his dad’

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A Chicago man has been charged with first-degree murder after police say he helped lure a nine-year-old boy into an alley with a juice box and then shot him in the head because of his father’s gang ties.

Dwight Boone-Doty, 22, was charged on Monday night in connection with the 2 November death of Tyshawn Lee.

Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Boone-Doty has been held since his November arrest on unrelated gun charges. Guglielmi said Boone-Doty has admitted to shooting the boy.

The fourth-grader was one of more than 400 homicide victims in the Chicago last year. But even in a city where children are all too often the innocent victims of relentless gang warfare, Tyshawn’s killing was shocking because, according to police, he was killed for no other reason than to punish his father.

“This was something that commanders ... had never seen before: a calculated execution to get back at his dad,” said Anthony Guglielmi, the department’s spokesman.



Interim police superintendent John Escalante said the killing was a “targeted assassination”.

Escalante said on Tuesday that Tyshawn’s death was the culmination of gang violence that spiraled into retaliation and showed “zero regard for human life”.

Escalante said three men were involved in the boy’s death: Boone-Doty, 27-year-old Corey Morgan, and a third man, Kevin Edwards, who remains at large and who is believed to be hiding in Iowa, according to US marshals. He said the three men betrayed Tyshawn, who “paid the ultimate price for gang violence, senseless gang violence, that plagued his neighborhood”.

“The plan was to execute him in the park, but we learned there were too many people in the park so they lured him into an alley, promising him a juice box,” Guglielmi said, noting that they also told Tyshawn they were friends of his father.



Police say Tyshawn was targeted because of his father’s gang affiliation and a recent series of shootings between two rival gangs, the Gangster Disciples and the Black P Stones, in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.

Investigators believe that the boy was killed in retaliation for the 13 October gang killing of Tracey Morgan, Corey Morgan’s 25-year-old brother.

Morgan has denied any involvement in the shooting.

It was not immediately clear Tuesday if Boone-Doty had an attorney who can comment on his behalf. Neither the Cook County state’s attorney’s office nor the public defender’s office immediately responded to phone messages seeking that information.

Boone-Doty also is charged with murder in the 18 October shooting death of 19-year-old Brianna Jenkins and attempted murder and aggravated battery in the wounding of Deshari Bowens, according to the state’s attorney’s office. Bowens, a 20-year-old man who is affiliated with a gang, was sitting in a car with Jenkins when she was killed.

Boone-Doty was paroled from the Illinois department of corrections in August after serving about two years on a five-year sentence in a drug case.