A young thug was sent silent and sullen to prison today for the random Harlem murder of high school basketball star Tayshana “Chicken” Murphy — instead, his vile Facebook posting from an hour after the shooting spoke for him.
“Ville up hoe,” Tyshawn Brockington, 23, had snarled online, a reference to Manhattanville Houses, which was at war with Murphy’s Grant Houses, leaving her as a bloody, innocent casualty in her building’s fourth floor stairwell two years ago.
By “Ville up,” the killer had meant that in Murphy’s death, Manhattanville had just notched a one-up victory in the two projects’ senseless war, prosecutors explained.
And “Hoe” was the killer’s final blow to the stranger who was his victim — again senseless given her undisputed virtues as a sister, daughter, friend and athlete.
“Killing her was not enough,” prosecutor Jeffrey Levinson said of Brockington at the emotional Manhattan Supreme Court sentencing. “He has to call her a pr0stitute, or a sl*t, or a wh*re.”
The judge, too, decried Brockington’s Facebook posting before giving him a 25-to-life sentence, the maximum allowed.
“Certainly the vile comment – “Ville up hoe” — made an hour later, showed some kind of abhorrent pride in what he had accomplished,” said Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber.
Four rows of the fallen basketball stars’ family members, friends and coaches attended the emotional sentencing.
“You took her breath,” mom Tephanie Holston said in a victim impact statement, her voice dignified but quavering as she faced her daughter’s murderer. “She wasn’t yours.”
Murphy, a senior at Murry Bergtraum High School, had been considered one of the country’s top female point guards. Her dream was to make it big — by shattering the gender barrier in the NBA, the prosecutor said.
“She set her sights on playing with the NBA with the men… and she made the promise that once she got there, she was going to bring everybody with her,” he said.
Watching the trial had been painful, said the judge.
“This is about young people killing other young people. And this is really really tragic to me,” he said.
“Sitting through the trial, and watching the videos and thinking about these two housing projects … What could that be,” he said of the bloody rivalries between the two projects, “other than some desire to create a sense of self worth by creating a sense of otherness against people who should be your brothers and sisters.
“That to me is incredibly tragic,” he added.
“Those bullets ended your life in a significant way as well,” judge told the perp.
“I try never to sentence out of vengeance,” he said. “We’re desperately in need of kinship rather than otherness. But I can’t impose in in a case like this any sentence other than the maximum sentence.”
Two lives have been effectively lost to gun violence: an 18-year-old girl who died far too young, and a 23-year-old man, who could spend the rest of his life in prison for her murder,” said Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., in a written statement issued after the sentencing. “My office will continue to work with communities across Manhattan to put an end to the gang and gun violence that was one of the contributing factors to Ms. Murphy’s untimely death.”
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