Scotty Scott
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Tyshene Mungo didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday like everybody else. She had to wait another day until she got to court.
“Today is my Mother’s Day,” Mungo said yesterday as she stared down the heartless thug who opened fire during a Harlem gang fight and killed her 13-year-old son, Scotty Scott, as he walked to a neighborhood store.
“My son will not be just another statistic.”
Mungo finally got justice yesterday when a Manhattan judge sentenced her son’s convicted killer to 32 years to life in prison.
For three years, the case had remained unsolved because of the strict but stupid “no snitching” code that rules much of Harlem and urban America.
Mungo, 37, held the handwritten statement she had planned to read to Judge Rena Uviller at 20-year-old Daniel Everett’s sentencing.
But she never once looked at it, speaking instead from her grieving, shattered, angry heart.
Because, before Everett sprayed a street corner crowd with his semiautomatic handgun, he had been a guest in Mungo’s home, staying for a while with her family after his own parents split up.
Mungo had treated him like a son.
Scotty had treated him like a brother.
“He didn’t love my son,” Mungo told the judge.
From her tiny shoulders hung a black RIP T-shirt with Scotty’s picture on it. It was worn and wrinkled. She had slipped it on many times.
“It wasn’t an accident,” she said. “My son was shot twice, not once.”
In the desperate days when cops had nothing to go on but silence and a futile reward, Mungo even went to Everett and asked him what he knew.
But it’s hardly a stretch that the killer was also a liar. So much for gratitude.
It took three long years for Mungo to get any help after Scotty was shot on West 144th Street and died on the Seventh Avenue median that divided the territories between two violent, rival gangs.
On Sept. 5, 2008, Scotty — a momma’s boy, Mungo said — was on his way to buy a pair of sneakers, but he never made it to the store.
“The defendant fired seven shots wildly, recklessly, and with a sheer disregard for life into a crowd,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., said in a statement.
“He waved his arm from side to side, spraying people with bullets. As a result of this senseless gang violence, a young life was lost, two people were seriously wounded, and a neighborhood will never be the same.”
Even though the sun had not yet set, and more than two dozen people saw the shooter recklessly whip out a 9mm and aim it at a thick crowd, everyone on the street that day — including two shooting victims who survived — somehow suffered collective amnesia.
Nobody wanted to “snitch.”
So off the killer went, hanging in the same streets with his same gang-banging buddies, while Mungo planned a funeral for a boy, one of many in recent years.
Everett was arrested three years later, after a witness came forward and finally did the right thing.
During the trial, prosecutors said Everett was recorded on a prison phone instructing his gang cohorts to intimidate witnesses in court and on the street.
But it didn’t stop justice from prevailing, even if it got pretty beat up along the way.
“I felt like I knew him,” Mungo said after the sentencing. “I thought he was sorry. It shocked me to hear things like that.”
But what shocked her more was the silence.
“If you and I rob a bank and walk out with $50,000, and you get caught with your $25,000, don’t tell them where my $25,000 is,” Mungo said. “That’s snitching.
“When you see something done in the street to someone, a human being, it should be a natural reaction to help. And if helping means telling, then that’s helping. Everybody has their own definition of snitching.”
Mungo hardly looked intimidated as she denounced the violence in her community and the awful silence that allows it to spread. And she says she has already gotten past whatever hate she held in her heavy heart, even as Everett stumbled through an empty apology and talked about his hopes and prayers.
“I’m sorry,” Everett said. “I wish things didn’t have to be like this.”
Mungo said she wasn’t even listening.
“One day, I’ll be able to forgive him,” the grieving mother said. “But not today.”