A Daughter’s Death

Tayshana Murphy whom everyone knew by her nickname Chicken hoped to win a basketball scholarship and become the first...
Tayshana Murphy, whom everyone knew by her nickname, Chicken, hoped to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree.Photographs by Christaan Felber for The New Yorker

On the evening of September 10, 2011, Taylonn Murphy took the subway to West Harlem to visit his eighteen-year-old daughter. He found her sitting on a bench, joking with her friends, in front of the building where she lived with her mother. “I need to talk to you,” he said, as he walked past her into the lobby. “When you get a chance, come upstairs.” It was a Saturday, two days after the start of her senior year, and she would likely stay out late, but he didn’t mind waiting. He had news that he knew she’d want to hear: a basketball scout from the University of Tennessee was coming to watch her play.

His daughter’s name was Tayshana—she had been named for him—but everybody knew her by her nickname, Chicken. She had hazel eyes, a contagious grin, a powerful build, and, on the inside of her right forearm, a tattoo of a basketball, with the words “It’s not a game, it’s my life.” She had missed the prior season, after tearing her A.C.L. and undergoing knee surgery. But she had begun playing again, and ESPN’s HoopGurlz had just named her the sixteenth-best female point guard in the nation. Now she was hoping to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree.

Chicken lived with her mother, her two brothers, her sister, and her sister’s baby, in a fifteenth-floor apartment at 3170 Broadway, just below 125th Street, near where the subway emerges onto an overhead track. The building is part of a large public-housing project called the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, situated a few blocks north of Columbia University. Murphy was separated from Chicken’s mother, Tephanie Holston, but he came by often to visit. That evening, he went into Chicken’s room and sat on her bed, surrounded by her basketball trophies. He took a couple of painkillers, to ease an ache in his neck and his back incurred in a recent car accident, and then, without intending to, he fell asleep.

Shortly after four o’clock the next morning, he awoke suddenly to hear his sixteen-year-old son, Taylonn, Jr., shouting, “They just shot Chicken!” Outside the apartment, Murphy heard screams coming from the stairwell. He ran down eleven flights, and found Chicken lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. Her sister, Tanasia, was hugging her and wailing, “Wake up! Wake up!” Somebody was shouting into a cell phone, pleading with a 911 operator to send help quickly. But, to Murphy, it looked as if his daughter was already dead.

She had, in fact, died almost immediately, after being shot three times, in the wrist, the hip, and the chest. A few hours later, a worker from the city medical examiner’s office placed Chicken’s body into a canvas bag and wheeled her out of the building on a gurney. Her mother walked alongside, one hand clutching the gurney’s metal frame. Murphy followed several steps behind, his eyes fixed on the ground.

In the days after the shooting, Murphy stayed at the apartment, answering calls from friends, relatives, coaches, school officials, and reporters. Weeping teen-agers came by at all hours, and Murphy did his best to comfort them. More than a hundred surveillance cameras monitor the Grant Houses, and soon the police had identified two suspects. One of them, Robert Cartagena, age twenty, had grown up in a housing project called the Manhattanville Houses, a block away, on the other side of 125th Street; the second suspect, Tyshawn Brockington, twenty-one, lived nearby. TV news shows broadcast their photographs, but nobody seemed to know where they were.

A wake was held at 6 p.m. on September 16th, at a funeral home in Queens, not far from the Queensbridge Houses, the project where Chicken had lived between the ages of three and fourteen. Murphy expected a few hundred mourners, but Chicken had been known throughout the city, and some three thousand people came. Teen-agers crowded along the sidewalk, chanting her name, and some wore laminated pictures of Chicken on chains around their necks. Murphy saw people he didn’t even recognize try to cut the line, claiming, “That’s my cousin!” The wake was supposed to end at nine, but it went on until almost midnight.

The burial was the next day, in New Jersey, and afterward the family attended a vigil that a friend organized in Queensbridge. Several hundred young people, holding white candles, stood around the perimeter of the basketball court where Chicken had played nearly every day of her childhood. Murphy had grown up playing basketball, too. Now forty-two, he approached a lectern on the side of the court with the weary gait of an aging athlete. He has a thin mustache that runs to the base of his chin, and large eyes behind square-frame glasses. He was still wearing his funeral clothes: black jacket, black tie, and black fedora.

“I don’t even know how I got through the last week,” he said. “I was supposed to be starting to take Tayshana to visit different schools. . . . I mean, it was crazy, because she was, like, ‘Pop, we’re finally on the same page!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we finally are on the same page.’ We were so much alike, we just bumped heads for years. And that’s only because I wanted the best for her.” Murphy paused, then added, “I didn’t want my kids to go through the things that I went through.” He didn’t elaborate, but people knew that he was referring to run-ins with the police and time in jail. Looking out at the crowd of teen-agers, he added, “I know you might be upset. I know there might be some pent-up anger. But please don’t go out and do anything in the name of Chicken.”

Ever since his daughter’s murder, friends and acquaintances had been asking Murphy, “What do you want to do?” They were asking him how he wanted to avenge her death, and he had thought about it; when he saw a police officer handing out wanted posters, Murphy told him, “You better find these guys before we do.” Then he got a call from a childhood friend, who lived in Columbia, South Carolina. The friend knew that criminals wanted in New York often fled to the South, and he had asked Murphy to send him photos of the suspects. Murphy e-mailed a link to a news story, and his friend shared it with people he knew. A few days after Chicken’s funeral, the friend called again, to say that someone had seen the suspects. Murphy was stunned. He wondered if it could be true and, if so, what he should do about it. Later, he told me, “I fought with myself through that whole night: ‘Am I going to do this? Am I going to go down there?’ ”

The next morning, before he could decide, a detective called: the suspects had been found, in Columbia. They were extradited to New York, and arraigned in a courthouse downtown. From their photographs, Murphy had assumed that they were “real killers and gangsters.” But, when he saw them, he says, “These guys were babies. Small in stature. Baby faces.” He asked himself, What am I going to do with these little guys?

Murphy had never thought much about how to stop the disproportionately high rates of violence in certain parts of the city, but now he could think of almost nothing else. Last year, there were three hundred and thirty-three homicides in New York City, the lowest number of any year on record. But almost twenty per cent of the shootings in the city occur in public-housing developments, which hold less than five per cent of the population. Violent crime is so concentrated in some projects—places like the Ingersoll Houses, in Brooklyn, and the Castle Hill Houses, in the Bronx—that to residents it can feel as if shootings and sidewalk memorials were part of everyday life.

One of the visitors to the apartment after Chicken’s death was Hakiem Yahmadi, a fifty-nine-year-old man from the Bronx, who was dressed in a custom-made linen leisure suit and gator shoes. Ten years earlier, he had been at his job, as a night manager at a D’Agostino’s supermarket, when his sister called to tell him that his thirty-year-old son, James, had been shot and killed. Yahmadi quit his job shortly afterward, and now spent much of his time trying to console other parents who have lost children, speaking about the perils of violence at schools, and working with stop-the-violence organizations. (Until recently, he served as the program manager of an anti-violence group called Save Our Streets South Bronx.)

That day, he had come to the apartment with about fifteen African-American and Latino men, many of them community activists who had formed a coalition called the Circle of Brothers. Murphy didn’t know any of the men, but he was grateful for their visit. As Yahmadi recalls, “He said, ‘When this is over, I’ll be with you. Drop me off in Vietnam. Anywhere I need to be, put me there.’ ” The men understood what Murphy was saying—at times, their communities did feel like a war zone—but his words surprised them. Most parents whose son or daughter has just been killed “aren’t thinking of anything like that,” Yahmadi says. “They’re just thinking about burying their child.”

Taylonn Murphy stands at the spot where his daughter was killed, in a hallway of the Grant Houses, in West Harlem.

Taylonn Murphy stands at the spot where his daughter was killed, in a hallway of the Grant Houses, in West Harlem.|||

{: legacyType="feature-small"}

Murphy began speaking often with Yahmadi and soon started following his example. Six weeks after Chicken’s murder, he attended a vigil in Brooklyn for Zurana Horton, a mother of thirteen, who had been killed by stray gunfire after picking up her eleven-year-old daughter from school. In February of 2012, a police officer chased Ramarley Graham, who was eighteen, into his family’s Bronx home, mistakenly believing that he had a gun, and shot and killed him. Murphy visited the house and befriended Graham’s parents. Four months later, a four-year-old boy, Lloyd Morgan, Jr., was killed by crossfire on a playground at the Forest Houses, in the Bronx. Murphy went to a press conference there the next day and found Shianne Norman, the child’s mother. “Hey, Sis. I know what you’re going through,” he called to her. “I lost my daughter. My daughter was Chicken.” Norman broke away from the reporters to speak with him, and they exchanged phone numbers. The next week, Murphy attended her son’s funeral.

He frequently had trouble sleeping, and he spent hours at night making lists of the problems that he saw—“violence,” “poverty,” “P.T.S.D. in the community.” Then he researched them on the Internet, and typed up ideas about how to fix them, including more counselling for children and teens traumatized by violence. He sketched out plans to start a foundation in Chicken’s memory, which would organize an annual basketball tournament. And he spoke on the phone with other parents of murdered children, many of whom were also unable to sleep. Some nights, Shianne Norman called, and they talked about their sadness and the unfairness of what had happened to their families.

She told him that, whenever she tried to talk to her boyfriend about their son’s death, he fled the room. The police had arrested two teen-age boys for Lloyd, Jr.,’s murder, and, when Norman had to go to court, Murphy went, too. One day, at the courthouse, he met Lloyd Morgan, Sr. He seemed angry and not interested in talking, but Murphy persisted, and eventually the two became friends. Norman says, “It was like a weight lifted off his back that he could actually have someone who understood him.” The couple are now engaged, and Norman credits Murphy with saving the relationship.

Murphy was born in the Queensbridge Houses, but, when he was four, his father, a Vietnam veteran who worked as a prison guard, moved the family into Lindsay Park, a middle-income housing complex in Williamsburg. In his junior high school, Murphy was in a gifted program, as was Jay Z, whom everyone knew as Shawn Carter, and who lived nearby, in the Marcy Houses. At Lindsay Park, Murphy had an unofficial big sister, named Esaw (Pinky) Snipes. For a while, they lived in the same building, and in the summer they went to day camp together. After they both moved away, they saw each other at Lindsay Park’s annual Old-Timers’ Day reunions. That’s where Murphy met Eric Garner, who died last year, on Staten Island, after a police officer put him in a choke hold; he was Pinky’s husband.

Murphy had not been nearly as focussed on basketball as Chicken had, but he was good enough to play for August Martin High School, in South Jamaica, Queens, which had a strong team. This was in the mid-eighties, and South Jamaica was the center of the city’s crack-cocaine trade. Murphy started selling marijuana in his junior year, and soon moved on to powder cocaine and crack, carrying a beeper in his book bag. Shortly after graduation, he was arrested—as he recalls, for steering customers to a seller—but a judge gave him “youthful offender” status. (If he obeyed the rules of his probation, the crime would not appear on his record.) Around the same time, while walking through Bedford-Stuyvesant one evening, he was shot in the arm by a stranger. The shooting seemed random—and unrelated to his drug-selling—but he took it as a sign that he needed to make a change in his life.

By 1990, Murphy, then twenty, had a job in a hospital laundry in the Bronx. One morning, running late, he hurried to catch a train and slipped through a subway gate without paying. A police officer stopped him and found a pistol in his briefcase. After he had been shot, Murphy says, he felt as if he needed a gun, though he hadn’t intended to take it to work. He didn’t usually carry his briefcase, but that day he had to bring papers for a meeting with his supervisor, and he had forgotten that the gun was there. He also did not know that the police had put out a warrant for his arrest. Nine months earlier, a man had been stabbed to death in a Queens park. A woman—a prostitute with a crack habit—had been with him, and when the police showed her a book of pictures she identified Murphy as the killer. (His photo was likely left over from his earlier drug arrest.)

He was charged with both weapons possession and murder and was taken to Rikers Island. Six months later, he was still there, awaiting trial, when he met Tephanie Holston, the friend of another inmate’s girlfriend, in the visiting room. She was nineteen then, and, Murphy recalls, she was “gorgeous inside and out.” She lived in a housing project in Brooklyn with her two young children and her grandmother. Murphy assured her that he had not killed anyone, and he managed to make her laugh, which impressed her, given the gravity of his situation. She began visiting him three times a week.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna write a number on this piece of paper, and I’m gonna slide the paper over to you real slowly. You’re gonna unfold the paper, read it, and then I’m gonna see if I can remember the number.”

In early 1991, Murphy was tried for murder. The trial ended in a hung jury; jurors voted 8-4 to acquit. The prosecutor put him on trial again, and the second jury did not convict him, either. A new lawyer, Steven Silberblatt, took over his defense, and filed a motion to dismiss the charges, but the prosecutor persuaded the judge that Murphy should be tried for a third time. Meanwhile, on Rikers, Murphy ran into an inmate he knew, Derrick Hamilton, who was also charged with a homicide that he said he had not committed. He told Murphy, “If you know you’re innocent, then you have nothing to worry about.”

Silberblatt, who worked for the Legal Aid Society, believed that Murphy was not guilty and that his first two trials had been “a farce.” He shared his doubts with the prosecutor, and worked out a deal in which Murphy would plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Murphy still maintained his innocence, but he agreed to the deal because, he said, it involved a rarely used agreement known as an Alford plea. (Typically, a defendant who pleads guilty has to say in court that he committed the crime, but with an Alford plea a defendant doesn’t have to admit to any wrongdoing.) By agreeing to the plea deal, Murphy wouldn’t have to risk a third trial, and he would soon be able to go home.

A judge sentenced him to one to three years and, with time served, he was released in April, 1992. On May 4, 1993, Chicken was born. If not for those two hung juries, Murphy, instead of having a daughter, might have spent decades in a penitentiary upstate. That’s what happened to his friend Derrick Hamilton; he was convicted and spent twenty years in prison. Last January, four years after Hamilton was released, a conviction-review unit in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office re-investigated his case, concluded that he was not guilty, and asked a judge to throw out his conviction.

When Murphy was a child, everybody called him Yummy, because he loved to eat. His favorite food was chicken, and when Tayshana was a baby he called her Chicken Wings, later shortened to Chicken. She first picked up a basketball at age three, and by six she could dribble a ball between her legs. She learned how to play by watching Murphy’s pickup games, and when she was nine she joined a boys’ travelling team called Triple Threat. She suffered from chronic asthma, and sometimes had to go to the hospital after a game, but she never wanted to stop playing. When she returned to Queensbridge after her fifth-grade graduation ceremony, she ran straight onto the basketball court, without stopping to change out of her dress.

Murphy had five children: a daughter, Deana, born when he was in high school, with whom he stayed in contact; Tephanie’s son and daughter, Robert and Tanasia, whom he considered his own; Chicken; and Taylonn, Jr. Chicken reminded him most of the teen-ager he had been. They both played point guard, and they had the same personality: headstrong, charismatic, and funny. Chicken liked to tell people that when she grew up she was not going to play in the W.N.B.A.: “I’m going to the N.B.A.” Murphy considered it his job to, as he put it, “keep her head able to fit through the door.” It wasn’t easy. The Daily News covered her high-school career with the sort of attention paid to professional athletes. When she was a freshman at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a Catholic school in Brooklyn, the News put her photo on the cover of a sports insert, noting that she averaged twenty-six points a game—“Simply put: Get her on the court and she’s trouble.”

By then, Chicken had moved to the Grant Houses with her mother and her siblings. Murphy couldn’t afford his own place, so he usually stayed with his mother or his brother, both of whom still lived in Lindsay Park. When Murphy had been on Rikers Island, the prosecutor’s plea deal had seemed like a get-out-of-jail-free card. But, in the fifteen years since, he had come to view it as a mistake; with a manslaughter conviction on his record, he had found it nearly impossible to get a decent-paying job. When he tried to explain to prospective employers that he was innocent, he could tell that they didn’t believe him.

Ron Artest, who then played for the Los Angeles Lakers, had grown up in Queensbridge. He funded Triple Threat, the travelling team Chicken had played for, and he paid her tuition when she entered high school. But Murphy still had to pay for her sneakers, school uniforms, and supplies, and the expenses for the travelling teams she played on. He took whatever jobs he could get: setting up for fashion shows on the West Side piers; promoting concerts at the Paradise Theatre, in the Bronx; driving a truck for a moving company. When he wasn’t working, he accompanied Chicken to practice, yelled advice from the sidelines at games, and drove her to out-of-state tournaments, sometimes as far away as Atlanta.

“Oh. Wow. Another sonnet.”

Chicken transferred to another Catholic school, and then, after her sophomore year, enrolled at Murry Bergtraum, a public high school in lower Manhattan, which had one of the top girls’ basketball programs in the country. But she tore her A.C.L. before the season started, while playing in a tournament. After her surgery, Murphy sensed that some of the college scouts who had shown interest in her earlier were skeptical that she would still be as explosive on the court. Her first full game was at the Nike Rose Classic, a prestigious girls’ tournament in Brooklyn, in the spring of 2011. She was supposed to wait another week, to get a sleeve fitted for her knee, but she persuaded the coach to let her play, and scored nearly thirty points.

Forty-five hundred people live in the nine brick towers that make up the Grant Houses. The Manhattanville Houses, with six buildings, are home to three thousand people. According to the New York City Housing Authority, the average household income for both projects is twenty-four thousand dollars a year, and nearly forty per cent of the residents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-one are unemployed. The projects are more than fifty years old and in severe disrepair. In the apartment where Chicken lived, the bathroom sink had fallen off the wall, and another wall had crumbled, leaving a gaping hole; the elevators often broke down.

Most of the city’s three hundred and twenty-eight housing projects are in poor condition, but, in 2013, Bill de Blasio, then the city’s public advocate, issued a report showing that the Grant Houses had more “outstanding work-order requests” than any other project in the city. Conditions such as lobby doors with broken locks and stairwells without lights exacerbate an already serious crime problem. In 2014, the News reported that “some of the city’s most crime-ridden housing projects are the same developments most in need of immediate repairs.”

For decades, the Grant and Manhattanville Houses had been embroiled in a feud. As in other projects, some young people joined “crews.” The Grant crew called itself 3 Staccs; Manhattanville’s was the Make It Happen Boys. The crews were not affiliated with established gangs, like the Bloods or the Crips, and their disputes were not about drugs or money. Rather, they fought over turf and status. Often, the conflicts seemed to be fuelled by little more than boredom.

After Chicken’s death, every time Murphy visited the Grant Houses he was besieged by grieving teen-agers, who called him Pops, slapped palms with him and hugged him, sometimes resting their heads on his shoulder. Some of Chicken’s friends were angry; many appeared depressed. They asked him why they should bother trying to finish school when it wasn’t guaranteed that they would live to see twenty-one. Murphy began referring to himself as a “one-man bereavement team.” He told the young people that he loved them and to stay in school, because Chicken would have wanted them to.

Murphy worried especially about his son Taylonn, Jr., whom everyone called Bam Bam. He had been very close to his sister, whom he strongly resembled. An aunt recalls, “Where you saw one, you saw the other. He looked up to her.” After Chicken’s death, a rumor spread that he was caught up in the Grant-Manhattanville feud, and that the killers had actually been looking for him. This mistaken-identity theory was not substantiated, and it did not hold up at trial. Still, Hakiem Yahmadi, who frequently visited Taylonn, Jr., said, “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young guy.” Murphy says that his son became more of an introvert, and began “self-sedating”; on many days, he appeared “drunk, twisted, totally wasted.” The neighbors noticed a difference, too. One said, “When they killed her, they killed him.”

Chicken’s grave was too far away to visit often, so when Murphy wanted to feel close to her he would sit for a while in her bedroom. Or, in a ritual he called “walking my daughter’s last steps,” he would climb the building stairwell from the lobby to the fourth floor, picking his way over cigarette butts and trying to ignore the smell of urine, to the spot where Chicken had died, and light a candle. Around the first anniversary of her death, he began seeing a therapist, at a clinic on the Lower East Side. Yahmadi was impressed. Most fathers he met in their situation would never consider therapy. “In our community, men don’t get help,” he says. “We’ll turn around and either drug it up or drink it up.”

In early 2011, Murphy had applied for a job as a subway conductor with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. (He had recently obtained from the state a “certificate of good conduct,” a document that he hadn’t previously known existed, which is intended to remove the stigma that ex-prisoners encounter in looking for work.) But now he asked to have his application put on hold; he didn’t feel ready to take on a full-time job. As his therapist explained in a letter to the M.T.A., “Taylonn A. Murphy is a 43 yrs old African-American male struggling with the sudden and tragic loss of his 18 yrs old daughter on September 11, 2011. Her sudden death and the circumstances of her death impaired Mr. Murphy socially and occupationally. Mr. Murphy has been suffering from insomnia, and as a result exhibits the following symptoms: fatigue, irritability, excessive daytime sleepiness, and a mild relapse of anxiety and depressive symptoms.”

Last May, in Queensbridge Park, at a picnic to mark what would have been Chicken’s twenty-second birthday, her sister, Tanasia, shows a tattoo commemorating her.

In the spring of 2013, Tyshawn Brockington became the first of the two murder suspects to go on trial. He had a prior arrest for assault, and, according to prosecutors, he belonged to the Manhattanville crew. Murphy and Tephanie Holston attended every day of the trial. Hakiem Yahmadi, Shianne Norman, and the parents of Ramarley Graham went when they could.

For the first time, Chicken’s parents heard the full story of their daughter’s murder. That day, dozens of young people from Grant and Manhattanville had been fighting. Brockington was assaulted, and that night a large group from Grant attacked Robert Cartagena on 125th Street. Chicken was on the street and watched the fight, then returned to 3170 Broadway and hung out in front of the building with friends, listening to a boom box and dancing. A few hours later, Brockington and Cartagena went to the Grant Houses looking for revenge. When they saw a crowd in front of 3170, they chased six teen-agers—Chicken, her brother, and four other boys—inside. The day before, Chicken had suffered an asthma attack; now she slowed down, and Brockington and Cartagena caught her in the hallway. It wasn’t clear who fired the weapon, but witnesses testified that, before Chicken was shot, she pleaded for her life. The jurors convicted Brockington of murder, and Judge Thomas Farber sentenced him to twenty-five years to life.

Cartagena’s lawyer repeatedly failed to appear in court, and his trial didn’t begin until a year later. Cartagena had a history of domestic violence, and prosecutors alleged that he, too, was a member of the Manhattanville crew. The jury found him guilty of murder. Judge Farber, who presided at this trial as well, called the crime “a cold-blooded execution,” and gave Cartagena the same sentence as Brockington’s. Then Farber spoke about the Grant-Manhattanville feud. He pointed out that the young men from the two projects had much in common: “They were the same young men. They live in the same geographical area.” The differences between them, he said, “don’t exist except in the minds of the people who are fighting. So they are fighting over nothing, really nothing.” But the feud had given them a “feeling of purpose,” and “unless we are able to impart meaning into our children’s lives, then this drama is going to keep playing again and again and again, and people are still going to die.”

Tyshawn Brockington’s mother, Arnita, had first learned that he was wanted for murder when another son called and told her to turn on the news. She was then fifty-five, and since 1983 she had lived across the street from the Manhattanville Houses, where she had raised five boys on her own—Tyshawn was the fourth—with money she made as a babysitter, an Avon representative, and working for the Parks Department. After Tyshawn’s arrest, she mostly stopped going out. When she did leave her building, she could feel everyone looking at her. “Hi, Arnita!” someone would shout, then say, loud enough for her to hear, “That’s the mother of the boy who killed Chicken.”

She didn’t attend every day of the trial. “I couldn’t take it,” she says. “It made me mentally and physically sick.” She saw Chicken’s parents in the courtroom and wanted to speak to them, but she didn’t know what to say, or whether they would even want to hear from her. After the trial, Derrick Haynes, a Harlem community activist and high-school basketball coach, asked her if she would like to meet Murphy.

Haynes had closely followed Tyshawn’s trial; he himself had grown up in the Manhattanville Houses, and, a month before the shooting, he had coached Tyshawn in a basketball tournament. No one is certain how the trouble between Manhattanville and Grant began, but Haynes says that it dates back to at least 1972, when he was eight, and his fifteen-year-old brother, Eli, was shot while trying to break up a school-yard fight. Eli, who died the next day, told the police that he had been shot by a boy from the Grant Houses.

Haynes introduced himself to Murphy and asked if he would meet with Brockington. Murphy agreed. He had seen how she sat slumped on a bench during the trial, sometimes leaving the courtroom and returning with reddened eyes. He did not blame her for what her son had done. “I came from a family with a mother and a father, and they had problems with me. And I think of five of me and just my mother?” he said. “I understand her plight.”

Members of Chicken’s family were shocked when they learned that he and Tyshawn’s mother had met and were beginning to form a friendship. Murphy had not consulted with them, and Holston was furious, especially since the trial had only just ended. She said, “There was so much rage.” But Hakiem Yahmadi says, “He’s looking at the bigger picture. How do you heal a community if everybody is going to walk around with bitterness and revenge and want to retaliate? This ain’t never going to stop.”

Friends at the picnic wear laminated pictures of Chicken.

Since Chicken’s death, the violence in Grant and Manhattanville had grown worse. A sixteen-year-old was shot in the shoulder, a twenty-one-year-old was shot in the leg, and at least three bystanders were hit. Taylonn, Jr., was still living in the Grant Houses with his mother, and during this time he acquired a rap sheet. At the end of 2012, he was arrested for burglary, after a dispute involving a cell phone; he was charged as a “youthful offender” and put on probation. The next summer, he was arrested again, accused, with four others, of punching a Manhattanville resident and robbing him of a hundred dollars.

At the same time, the neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying. Double-decker tour buses frequently drove by the projects, and passengers took pictures of the residents. “It’s like they’ve never seen people before,” Arnita Brockington said. Meanwhile, a sleek, nine-story glass block, designed by Renzo Piano, was rising right across Broadway. It will house Columbia University’s new science center, the first of sixteen buildings to be erected as part of a six-billion-dollar addition to the main campus.

One afternoon, Haynes and Murphy walked over to Community Board 9, which advises West Harlem residents on city services available to them, to get information about its youth committee. The C.B. 9 office is on Old Broadway, a block-long street that runs north from 125th Street, just east of Broadway. The street connects the Grant and Manhattanville Houses, and almost every day after school it became a battle zone, with kids throwing bottles at one another and sometimes fighting. That afternoon, as trouble began, Haynes went to talk to the kids from Manhattanville; Murphy headed toward the Grant kids. After a few stern words from each, the fighting stopped. The Reverend Georgiette Morgan-Thomas, the chair of C.B. 9, has worked on anti-violence initiatives in Harlem for fifteen years. She watched the two men, then told them, “We need you on this block.”

Two doors down from the office was a shuttered storefront, with a faded sign that read “Flerida Beauty Salon.” Murphy and Haynes discussed trying to take over the space and convert it into a crisis center. In the meantime, they began walking through the projects with Arnita Brockington. In the Grant Houses, people asked Murphy, “Why is she here?” “What are you doing with her?” But, eventually, residents got used to seeing the three of them together. Stories had begun circulating that the police were planning a major crackdown, and they warned the teen-agers to stay out of trouble.

Murphy and Haynes never called the kids they met “disconnected youth,” but that is how academics and policymakers would describe many of them. (The term refers to young people who are neither in school nor working; the group comprises about twenty per cent of New York City residents between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.) To try to help these young people, Murphy and Haynes organized a jobs seminar with a representative from the community-affairs office of Columbia University; attempted to broker a truce between the projects; and spoke to everyone they could find who might be able to help them open a crisis center, including the city councilman Mark Levine, who endorsed the idea. “We desperately need a safe, positive space for young people in both developments to get to know one another and tear down this wall of animosity,” Levine said. “We don’t have any sustained program for that.”

They also talked to Daryl Khan, a reporter for a nonprofit news site called the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, who wrote extensively about their efforts. As Murphy later put it, “People want to blame the children, but they’re the product of all this madness. Adults—we should have had these things worked out for them a long time ago.”

When Murphy wasn’t in West Harlem, he continued to attend vigils and funerals, console grieving parents and teens, and occasionally visit schools in the Bronx with Yahmadi. Lee Clayton Jones, a childhood friend of Murphy’s who teaches political science in Atlanta, told me that he understood why Murphy never seemed to stop working. “If his daughter is able to be murdered like that and nothing structurally changes in black communities, then that’s a type of waste that cannot be rationalized, that’s a complete waste,” he says. “In order for her life to have meaning, something positive must come from it.”

In January of 2013, Murphy heard that a sixteen-year-old boy named Raphael (Sadonte) Ward had been shot and killed on the Lower East Side, and the next day he and Yahmadi went to the family’s home, in the Baruch Houses. They spoke with the boy’s mother, father, and stepfather. The mother, Arlene Delgado, says, “Just the fact that Taylonn and Hakiem had lost their children—I already knew that they understood exactly what I was going through.”

At the end of the picnic, friends and relatives released lanterns over the East River.

Murphy stayed in contact with Delgado, sending a text message every week. She says, “There were days I woke up—I was still hurt, but I was O.K. And then there were days that I woke, and I said, ‘I want to kill the motherfuckers that did this to my son.’ ” Then she would call Murphy and tell him, “I’m having one of those angry moments.” One day, he replied, “You think I don’t wake up angry? They killed my baby!” But then he quickly calmed down and told her, “You’re going to be all right. Don’t let the Devil rent no space in your head. That’s what he wants.”

Early on the morning of June 4, 2014, the thrum of helicopter rotors could be heard throughout West Harlem. Police Commissioner William Bratton tweeted a picture of himself standing on a street corner, surrounded by officers, with the caption “With members of the #NYPD Gang Division & Chief of Patrol this AM in West Harlem.” With Bratton watching, some five hundred officers had raided the Grant and Manhattanville Houses. Arnita Brockington woke to the sound of someone banging on her door. The police burst in, she said, before she could finish dressing. They were looking for her seventeen-year-old son, Naquan, whom they handcuffed and took away.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., had secured the indictments of a hundred and three young men, all of whom were allegedly members of three neighborhood crews: 3 Staccs, the Make It Happen Boys, and Money Avenue, which was based a few blocks east, on Manhattan Avenue. A press release from Vance’s office described this as the “largest indicted gang case in NYC history.” The youngest defendant was fifteen, the oldest was thirty; the average age was twenty.

Four years earlier, shortly after Vance took office, he had created the Crime Strategies Unit, and prosecutors had zeroed in on West Harlem as a “violent crime hot spot.” Now they alleged that, since the start of 2010, the three crews had been responsible for two murders, at least nineteen nonfatal shootings, and about fifty other incidents in which shots were fired but nobody was hit. One of the murder victims was Chicken. The other was Walter Sumter, an eighteen-year-old who had been shot in the chest just after midnight on December 30, 2011, as he was leaving a party. That homicide had yet to be solved. By filing a gang-conspiracy case, prosecutors hoped to put an immediate end to the crew-versus-crew violence. Or, as Vance’s chief assistant explained, “We like to take it out at the root so it doesn’t come back.” The D.A.’s office had already filed thirteen other such cases in Manhattan.

The indictments reflected a strategy, favored by Vance’s office and the N.Y.P.D., to build conspiracy cases that rely heavily on social media. For the West Harlem case, police and prosecutors had scrutinized more than a million social-media pages, and eavesdropped on thousands of inmate phone calls. The indictments were filled with posts that the defendants had allegedly written on Facebook, bragging about past crimes and threatening future ones, with claims such as “ima kill u” and “i want one of them dead.” Prosecutors use such posts to show relations among the defendants and to prove intent, while defense attorneys often contend that their clients were merely posturing.

Murphy learned about the raid at around 6 a.m., when he got a call from Derrick Haynes. He was devastated to discover that his son was among those indicted. At the time, Taylonn, Jr., was already in jail; four months earlier, he’d been arrested in connection with an assault. Now he and thirty-five others—all alleged members of 3 Staccs—faced a number of felony charges, including weapons possession, assault, attempted murder, and conspiracy.

Later that day, Vance held a press conference at N.Y.P.D. headquarters, at One Police Plaza. He mentioned Chicken as “one of the victims in this senseless gang escalating war,” and added, “You need to look no further than the Murphy and Brockington families in this case to see the tragedy of how parents are losing their children—multiple children—potentially to prison, and perhaps to an early grave.” He described the residents’ fear, and said, “The takedown we believe will immediately improve public safety in the areas where the gangs operated.”

Haynes and Murphy agreed that something needed to be done about the violence, but they did not think that this was the right solution. Many of the young men they had been trying to mentor were now headed to Rikers Island. That afternoon, Daryl Khan, the reporter, found the two men on Old Broadway. They appeared “visibly crestfallen and weary,” he wrote. Murphy summed up their frustration by saying, “We asked the city for help, and we got a raid.” Later, he added, “The money spent on this indictment, the money spent on this military-style raid, the money spent on housing these young individuals, the money spent on this prosecution—if you took two per cent or ten per cent of that money, we might be able to have enough money to deal with this whole youth problem.”

“All right, pal, I’m just saying, that’s what I’d do if it was my Large Hadron Collider.”

Some criminal-law experts were also critical. K. Babe Howell, a professor at the City University of New York law school, sees a connection between the low crime rate and the large-scale indictment. With the decline in crime, she said, prosecutors in the D.A.’s office have less to do, and “that leaves a lot of brainpower to think and be creative. But it’s one of those situations: when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a prosecutor,” the question becomes, “How do we prosecute these crews? Instead of, How do we intervene early and think about diversion?” In Howell’s view, the city would have done better to revive an approach that emphasized conflict resolution and mediation. She said, “New York City had a policy of using street workers in the nineteen-fifties and sixties.” The street workers were local people hired by the city to deter gang members from violence and help them find jobs—essentially what Haynes and Murphy had been trying to do. This tactic was, she believed, more effective than the city’s current strategy of “an intense law-enforcement-based suppression of street gangs,” which she called “a shortsighted approach.”

After the raid, the projects grew quieter, and the number of shootings dropped. Some residents told reporters that they were relieved and were no longer afraid to leave their apartments. Others were outraged by how the raid had been conducted and by the years of surveillance that had preceded it. Twice in the fall, family members of the defendants gathered outside the criminal courthouse, at 100 Centre Street, to protest the arrests. They were joined by a few dozen students from Columbia University, waving signs with slogans such as “Jobs Not Raids” and “Mass Incarceration Is a Racist Tool.” A mother from the Grant Houses told a reporter from the Columbia Spectator, “The police sat on this for four years. They didn’t step in. There was no mediation because they wanted us to just go away.”

The day after the raid, the university’s vice-president for public safety had sent a campus-wide e-mail declaring that the “indictments make our city and community safer. . . . Following these arrests, we are actively supporting an enhanced police presence in West Harlem.” The message angered some students, who interpreted it to mean that the university fully endorsed the police action. A Columbia spokesperson disputed this in an e-mail: “We do not comment about the tactics of the N.Y.P.D. The June 5th message focussed on information about measures taken to promote the safety of our community, and students who maintain otherwise are mistaken.”

Meanwhile, the topic of police-community relations had become front-page news, following the deaths of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner. Students at Columbia began inviting Murphy to speak on campus. George Joseph, now a senior, who has written articles for The Nation and The Intercept, says, “Everyone learns a lot from talking to Taylonn. He always has really positive energy, he’s always looking forward.” Murphy became friends with some students, and he invited them to meet residents of the Grant Houses, to join a picnic to mark Chicken’s twenty-second birthday, and to attend Ramarley Graham’s third-annual memorial service, in the Bronx. At large rallies against police brutality, Murphy marched alongside Columbia students, and introduced some to his childhood friend Esaw Snipes Garner.

Compared with some of the protesters, Murphy had a more nuanced view of the police. If not for the efforts of law enforcement, his daughter’s killers would still be at large. (He referred to the period after she had been murdered and before her killers were caught as “the longest ten days of my life.”) Besides that, his whole life had afforded him a unique understanding of the criminal-justice system. He was the son of a prison guard, but he also knew how it felt to be a prisoner. He had made money selling drugs, but had also been tried twice for a murder he had not committed. He had learned how it felt to sit in the spectator section of a courtroom and watch the killers of his child go on trial, and now he was sitting on a courtroom bench again, and finding out how it felt to be the father of a defendant.

In January, nearly eight months after the raid, Manhattan prosecutors filed a new criminal case, charging four young men—all alleged members of 3 Staccs—with the murder of Walter Sumter. One of the accused was Taylonn, Jr. In court papers, prosecutors laid out their theory: Sumter had been a member of the Money Avenue crew, and had been “widely hated by the 3 Staccs gang.” He had allegedly obtained the 9-mm. handgun that had been used to kill Chicken, and crew members used it to shoot at 3 Staccs members.

Prosecutors persuaded the judge to join the murder case with the gang-conspiracy case, arguing that the alleged crimes were related. This is not an unusual practice; combining major felony charges with conspiracy charges can make convictions easier to obtain. And if, as sometimes occurs, a jury acquits a defendant of murder but convicts him of conspiracy, it is still a victory for the prosecution. According to Taylonn, Jr.,’s attorney, Patrick J. Brackley, the murder case is “very flawed.” He said, “There is no forensics, no fingerprints. There is no weapon that is connected to Taylonn, Jr.” At trial, the prosecutors’ case will likely rely on social-media posts and on testimony from other defendants in the hundred-and-three-person indictment, who are now coöperating with law enforcement.

“Their bookshelves look more convincingly read from than ours.”

On the day that Taylonn, Jr., was charged with murder, Murphy was the only spectator in the courtroom. He sat on a bench near the front, his head bowed to one side, his lips pressed tightly together. His son had been sixteen when Walter Sumter was killed. Now nineteen, Taylonn, Jr., faced the possibility of spending decades in prison. Officers escorted him into the courtroom, wearing gray sweatpants and a gray shirt, his wrists cuffed behind his back. He stood before the judge for a few minutes, then was ushered out, nodding to his father as he left. Afterward, Murphy said little except that Taylonn, Jr., had insisted that he was innocent. He added, “I love my son dearly.”

The following week, a twenty-four-year-old woman sent Murphy a message on Facebook:

Hi Mr Murphy I know we don’t know each other but I used to play ball with your daughter my name is Rayah Feb 1 2015 I lost my young cousin Christopher Graham. It made the news. If you’re free Monday at 9 am his funeral is at Unity. I would really appreciate your uplifting wise words.

Graham, who was twenty-two, had been shot in the head after performing at a rap show in the Bronx. Rayah thought that Graham’s friends would need to hear “real stuff” at his funeral, and she remembered Murphy, whom she had heard speak three years earlier, at the funeral of a friend.

Taylonn, Jr.,’s latest legal troubles had not deterred Murphy from continuing his work. On the morning of Graham’s funeral, he attended another court date for his son, then took the subway to the Unity Funeral Chapel, in Harlem. By the time he arrived, the crowd was spilling out the door, and the pastor was finishing up. Some of Graham’s friends had laminated his photograph and wore it on chains around their necks.

On the sidewalk, Murphy spoke to a few people, then spotted fifteen young men standing off to the side, tattoos covering their arms, pants riding extra-low. He walked over to them and said, “I understand what’s going on here. This is just a real messed-up situation.” The men may or may not have known who Murphy was, but they seemed to be listening. “I understand your pain right now,” he said. “Because every time I see something like this, I go through the same pain.” He delivered his usual message: Do not shoot someone to retaliate for your friend’s death. Or, as he put it that day, “Sometimes, we take ourselves and put ourselves in a worse position from a bad position.”

He spoke briefly, then ended as he always did: “I love you all.” A few feet away, a young man popped the cork on a bottle of pink Moët & Chandon, sprinkled some on the ground in Graham’s honor, and then passed it around to his friends, who quickly finished it.

In early June, almost two years after Murphy and Derrick Haynes had started talking about opening a crisis center, they obtained a lease to a six-hundred-square-foot storefront on Old Broadway, in a building that belonged to the city. It wasn’t the former beauty shop but an abandoned social club next door, where local residents had once gathered to play dominoes and cards. After it closed, tenants who lived upstairs appeared to have used it for storage; there was a refrigerator, a supermarket cart, a VCR, an iron, an eight of hearts, and unopened mail from years back. The stench—of dust, dirt, and mildew—was suffocating. But to Murphy and Haynes the location, between the two projects, was ideal. The rent is fourteen hundred dollars a month. They had paid for two months, with a donation from an elderly woman who used to live nearby. Now they needed to raise money to renovate the space.

In the year since the raid, there had been one homicide in the projects, but, according to the N.Y.P.D., it was unrelated to the feud. Of the hundred and three defendants charged in the conspiracy case, eighty-one have pleaded guilty; three were convicted at trial; one was acquitted; and the rest are waiting for their cases to go to trial. Most of those who had been convicted were in prison, though several were out on probation or attending court-ordered programs. Arnita Brockington’s son Naquan pleaded guilty to attempted gang assault, and is now in a medium-security prison upstate; he is eligible for parole in 2018. Taylonn, Jr., is still on Rikers Island awaiting his trial, which will likely start early next year.

On a humid afternoon in late June, Murphy and Haynes sat outside the storefront. Old Broadway was quiet until eight police officers appeared across the street, with two boys from Manhattanville, in handcuffs. News of what had happened spread on the block: the boys had been leaving a store around the corner when a car drove by and a young man from Grant got out, shouting threats and claiming that he had a gun. The two boys ran. The police stopped them, but the car drove off. Now a Manhattanville resident was shouting, “These Grant kids are out of control!”

“John, the bees go on the outside.”

After checking that neither boy had an open warrant, the police released them, and the block grew calm again. Murphy shook his head. “Everyone else in their right mind would say, ‘You can’t pay me enough to deal with this headache,’ ” he said. But later that afternoon he planned to walk through the Grant Houses, to find out who had been behind the dispute, and explain again why the violence had to stop. Not everyone got the message: two weeks later, a twenty-four-year-old man was shot in the Grant Houses.

Soon after the raid, the district attorney’s office had started a youth-sports program in Manhattanville, but Murphy and Haynes believed that much more was needed. They hoped to offer job training, G.E.D.-prep courses, and parenting classes. Murphy had already set up a “first responder” team, made up of two mothers whose sons had been killed, to visit families who have lost a child. Arnita Brockington will work in the office, and Columbia students will volunteer time there. By the end of the summer, the men had yet to raise enough money for renovations, but they had submitted applications for grants.

Murphy hopes, someday, to be paid to do this kind of work, and to get an apartment of his own, but for now he still spends most nights with family members. Not long ago, he found himself awake at 3 a.m., staring at his cell phone. A friend in New Jersey had visited Chicken’s grave and sent a photo of her tombstone, which reads:

Beloved Daughter

Tayshana Murphy

05-04-1993 — 09-11-2011

Murphy thought back to her childhood, remembering how he used to call her Hollywood Wings and tell her “Have fun!,” as she sprinted onto the court at the start of a game. Holding the phone in one hand, he typed onto his Facebook page, “Tayshana Chicken Murphy you reached for them stars, you have landed on the moon. God called you home, and I accept that. I really have no choice but to. Yet I know, Chicken Wings, we still have a journey to complete. I have heard you these three-going-on-four years, telling me I must keep going. Our dreams of changing lives have just begun.” He typed a few more lines, then added, “Until we see each other again, Rest in Paradise. I Love You.” ♦