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Editorial: Not a prank

By The TimesLedger

One of the most horrific crimes committed in southeast Queens in recent memory is now one step closer to closure. Last week State Supreme Court Judge Robert Hanophy sentenced Darryl Tyson to spend the next 16 years in prison for his role in the brutal killing of a Chinese food deliveryman.

Tyson is 19 now. He was only 17 on Sept. 1, 2000, when he and four of his friends ordered Chinese food to be delivered to an abandoned house in Springfield Gardens.

When Jin Sheng Liu arrived at the house, the teenagers threw a blanket over his head and crushed his skull with a brick. As Liu lay bleeding to death on the sidewalk, the heartless killers took his money and the food and enjoyed the meal in one of their homes.

The hardworking business owner left behind a wife and small children. The family subsists on the kindness of friends. The children will grow up without a daddy. When the young men and women who planned and committed this crime leave prison, these children will still be coping with the pain of their loss.

The expression “senseless violence” is used so often that it has lost its meaning. And yet it has never fit so well. These kids weren’t even hungry. Nor were they poor. They had already eaten Chinese food once that day. The young lady charged in the murder allegedly ordered the food from her own cell phone.

In pleading for mercy, Tyson’s mother said her son was “a victim of peer pressure” who was enticed to “play a prank with deadly consequences.”

The judge wasn’t buying that excuse. Said Judge Hanophy: “When you make a plan to lure someone to a location to rob them, it is not a prank.”

It was not the first time that a Chinese deliveryman had been robbed in southeast Queens. These are easy marks. It’s likely that many, perhaps most, of these robberies are not reported. The question that has yet to be answered in this case is the role that racism may have played. At what point did their tiny adolescent consciences shut down? Did they somehow think it was OK to attack Liu because he was Chinese?

From all that we know about the suspects and those who have already taken a plea, the kids involved were not hardened criminals. In fact, the young lady who allegedly made the call was planning to enter college that week. The pain of one evil, thoughtless moment will touch many families.

Tyson was lucky. Although he was facing a second-degree murder charge, he was allowed to plead to robbery. When he gets out of prison, he will still be a young man. Boa Zhu Chen will still be a widow. Her children will grow up without a father.

We hope that the young people who carried out this crime will make the most of their time in prison, that they will emerge better prepared to live in a civilized world. More than that, we hope that the story of this crime will serve as an object lesson to thousands of teenagers living in Queens.

They must understand how a plan to commit a relatively minor crime turned into a tragedy that will affect the lives of many people. Community leaders may also want to examine the possibility of an underlying racism that allowed five teenagers to think that throwing a blanket over Liu’s head and robbing him was nothing more than a “prank.”