Shonpaul Perry knows this much for sure: After school on May 1, 2018, while his son Tyshon, 16, and some friends were walking to a Metro station in Northeast D.C., they were attacked by a group of young males, one of whom plunged a knife into Tyshon’s chest, piercing his aorta.
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As for what happened later — prosecutors, in plea deals, agreed not to pursue murder charges against the only two defendants arrested in the stabbing — “none of it makes any sense to me,” the father said.
“I thought the criminal justice system was a fair and equitable place,” he said recently. “I didn’t have a lot of experience before. Seeing it firsthand, well …”
Now he realizes the system can be messy and uncertain, as it has been in this case, with less-than-compelling evidence; with hesitant witnesses steeped in an ethos against “snitching”; with conflicting legal theories on who can be held culpable for murder in Tyshon’s death; and, so far, with no true justice for his son, Perry said. There is only a compromise — a pair of plea agreements to resolve what seemed to be a problematic prosecution for the government.
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At a January court hearing, the father said, he will ask a judge to reject the pleas. “He was a scholar and a hero,” Perry said of his son. “He deserves more.”
For a grieving father, a ‘manifest injustice’ in court after his son’s slaying
Tyshon, who aspired to a career in the FBI, was a sophomore honor student at KIPP D.C. College Preparatory charter high school. Shortly past 4:30 p.m. on his last day alive, he and several schoolmates, including a teenager identified in court papers only as “A.C.,” were confronted by four young males in the 1300 block of Second Street NE, near the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro station, a short walk from the KIPP campus.
Hours earlier, in a classroom, A.C. had made a wisecrack about a female student’s hair, and the two had gotten into a shoving match, witnesses told homicide detectives. Authorities said the four males, none of whom attended KIPP, showed up after school to assault A.C. on the girl’s behalf. Tyshon, stabbed in the ensuing brawl, was pronounced dead at a hospital.
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Two cousins, Kurt and Demonte Hewitt, were initially charged with second-degree murder, although no witnesses had identified which of the four males wielded the knife. Then, more than three years after the arrests, the U.S. attorney’s office changed course: In return for the cousins’ pleading guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, prosecutors agreed to move for dismissal of the murder charges.
The Hewitts are scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 21 in D.C. Superior Court. Judge Neal E. Kravitz said he will decide that day whether to accept or reject the plea agreements, and Perry will have a chance to speak his mind. If Kravitz approves the deals, neither defendant is expected to get a prison term exceeding 10 years, the father said, based on his recent conversations with prosecutors.
And whatever sentences the cousins get, subtract about 3？ years for the time they’ve been in jail since their arrests.
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Meanwhile, it is unclear whether detectives have positively identified the two other young males involved in the assault. Only the Hewitts have been charged in the case, a police spokesman said, and the investigation is considered closed.
“Of course it’s devastating,” said Perry, 49, a library associate in the D.C. Public Library system. His wife, Gina Nixon-Perry, 42, is also a city library associate. Tyshon was the second-oldest of their five children, growing up in a tidy duplex in the Deanwood area of Northeast Washington. In talking with the U.S. attorney’s office about the plea deals, the father said, “We were very adamant that we were in total disagreement. … Now no one will be held accountable for our son’s murder.”
On May 22, 2018, two weeks after Tyshon’s funeral, a homicide detective signed a 20-page affidavit that details the stabbing investigation and that was used to obtain arrest warrants for Kurt Hewitt, then 18, and Demonte Hewitt, who was 16 at the time but is being prosecuted as an adult. The detective’s sworn statement is typical of police affidavits filed in thousands of D.C. homicide cases over the years, asserting “probable cause” for an arrest based largely on disparate threads of information from reluctant witnesses, with plenty of holes in the overall narrative.
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To protect witnesses’ identities, they are referred to in affidavits only by numbers (W-1, W-2) and the pronoun “it.” In the Tyshon Perry case, “W-7 was not fully cooperative with the investigation and failed to provide the names of the fellow students IT knew were involved in the argument that led to this murder.” And, “W-2 … indicated that IT was trying to do the right thing, but that IT did not want IT’s name put in this.” And, “W-7 did not want to look at any pictures and/or security video stills because IT was not comfortable with doing so.”
Within days of the killing, the affidavit says, Demonte Hewitt posted Instagram messages reinforcing the street code against helping the police: “if you work for da fed boy u a snitch. #DontTellOnMe.” And, “you better hold your water bet not tell on me.”
After examining security-camera videos and social media posts, the affidavit says, detectives came up with images of the four unidentified males they believed had started the fight. When shown the photos, some witnesses confirmed that the males were the assailants. The suspects were labeled S-2, S-3, S-4 and S-5 in the affidavit.
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Two witnesses cited in the affidavit said S-2 had a pistol, and at least one said S-2 whipped Tyshon in the face with the gun. A pathologist noted that Tyshon had a black eye. After showing witnesses a mug shot from a previous case, the affidavit says, detectives determined that S-2 was Kurt Hewitt. Another witness identified S-4 as “Monte,” later determined to be Demonte Hewitt, the affidavit says. No witnesses reported seeing either cousin with a knife.
The two males who have not been arrested are S-3 and S-5 in the affidavit. S-3 had a distinctive unibrow. One witness said that as three of the attackers were running away, the assailant with the unibrow “hit the decedent with either a swiping or punching motion ‘one final time’ as the decedent was lying motionless on the ground,” the affidavit says. But no witnesses reported seeing S-3 with a knife, and there is no mention of the knife being found. Nor is there any reference to video of the stabbing.
Questioned by police, Kurt Hewitt acknowledged being in the melee but said the other group had started it, according to the affidavit. He told detectives that he went to KIPP only to visit a friend. He denied seeing a knife or the stabbing or possessing a pistol. The affidavit does not recount any statement by Demonte Hewitt. The U.S. attorney’s office eventually obtained an indictment charging each with six felonies, including conspiracy to commit a violent crime and second-degree murder.
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The murder charges were tied to the alleged conspiracy. Although authorities couldn’t say for sure which of the four attackers had stabbed Tyshon, one of them certainly had done it. To the prosecutors who initially handled the cases, the killing was a reasonably foreseeable outcome to a plot by armed assailants to commit a violent offense, meaning the assault on A.C. Thus, no matter who pulled the knife, all of the assailants were culpable for Tyshon’s death under a legal doctrine known as vicarious liability, as the prosecutors saw it.
However, if the U.S. attorney’s office had persisted with the murder cases, the Hewitts’ attorneys almost certainly would have argued in court that the conspiracy-liability theory was a stretch, that their clients had been “over-charged” and that the murder count in the indictment should be dismissed by a judge. They would have asserted that the brawl was little more than a common after-school fight until one of the participants — who knew which? — got carried away, and that the stabber’s companions weren’t criminally responsible for what he did.
“The U.S. attorney’s office typically does not comment on charging decisions and has no comment on this particular case,” a spokesman said recently.
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As for the cousins, “Demonte Hewitt should not have been charged with murder in the first place,” his lawyer, Jessica Willis, said in a statement. “Demonte did not stab Tyshon Perry. Demonte did not have a knife and did not know anyone else in the fight had a knife.” Kurt Hewitt’s attorney, Mary Kennedy, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Two more students at KIPP D.C. College Preparatory have fallen victim to homicides since Tyshon’s death, both this year. One was stabbed Aug. 18 in front of the school; the other was shot Dec. 3 near his Northeast Washington home.
Shonpaul Perry used terms such as “eye-opening” and “appalling” to describe his newfound knowledge of how things work on the streets and in the courts. He and his wife, both D.C. natives, came of age amid the crack scourge three decades ago, when the city was America’s murder capital, but they were raised in stable, middle-class households, sheltered from the worst violence.
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Then it found them.
In September, when the two prosecutors now handling the cases called to inform the couple that most of the indictment, including the murder charges, would be dropped, “they understood our anger,” Shonpaul Perry said. “They told us they had discussed it with their superiors, and the result was, their superiors thought this was the best way, with the sketchy witnesses and all the variables.”
In October, as the father looked on, Kurt and Demonte Hewitt pleaded guilty to two counts each of assault with a dangerous weapon, for the attacks on A.C. and Tyshon, and to some lesser charges in an unrelated case.
On Jan. 21, when he asks for the pleas to be rejected, Shonpaul Perry said, he plans to tell Judge Kravitz “that we raised our children to always respect the law. But it comes across to me that in this system, human life doesn’t have a value, in a sense.”