She danced before she died.
The final hours of tragic high school basketball star Tayshana “Chicken” Murphy were remembered by her sister in tearful testimony today in the Manhattan murder trial of two men blamed in her senseless shooting.
“My sister talked me into coming downstairs with her a while,” the sister, Tanasia Williams, 23, recounted wistfully, testifying as the first witness against Terique Collins and Tyshawn Brockington.
The two young sisters had laughed and danced with friends that night in September, 2011, to music being played outside their home, in the dark courtyard of Harlem’s Grant Houses.
“Chicken” would only make it halfway back upstairs, Williams recalled.
“Chicken got killed!” Tanasia said she remembered hearing her brother scream just a few hours later, banging on her door and waking her.
Williams told jurors she ran out of bed and down the project stairs to find her fallen sister, who’d been nicknamed “Chicken” ever since she was a bow-legged baby, for her “funny” walk and physical strength.
“Chicken” was a senior at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, and had been considered one of the country’s best young point guards. She planned to be in the WNBA, and had colleges lining up to enroll her, her sister said.
“I got to the fourth floor stairwell, and there was a bullet sitting on the top of the steps,” Williams told jurors. She remembered bending, dazed, to pick the bullet up.
When she saw her sister’s corpse, the bullet would slip back out of her hand.
“As I got to the top of step, I saw my sister laying there,” the sister testified, wiping her wet eyes with her hand. “With blood on her head, and just laying there, dead.”
Brockington, 23, is accused of being one of the two gunmen who shot the doomed young women, who prosecutor Tiana Walton said in opening statements as just a tragic bystander to ruthless gang violence between Grant and Manhattanville Houses.
“Keep in mind, there is no witness to Miss Murphy’s murder,” Brockington’s lawyer, Daniel Parker, told jurors in openings earlier today.
Collins, 25, is accused of supplying the gun, but not participating in the shooting.
“They’re not going to produce any gun — no gun, no DNA, no fingerprint evidence,” Collins’ lawyer, David McGruder.