Tonya Crowder is a good cook, and last Christmas was extra special. She expected to have her fiance, Roosevelt Myles, join her at home for the holiday for the first time. So she drew up a menu: greens, chicken and dressing, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, pie, caramel cake.
“According to everything that I see, the only decision that [the judge] can make is either ‘Come home,’ or even if he does continue to start the hearing, they should release him because he was wrongfully sentenced,” she says of her mind-set before last year’s hearing. “So everything said come home to me.”
Today, Crowder and Myles remain together, making their relationship work as well as they can. His fight to prove his innocence is far from over: last month, Bonjean filed a brief appealing Porter’s decision. “I’ve never been more confident in a reversal,” she told me in a phone interview. In the meantime, with all the credit that he’s accrued for good behavior, Myles could finish his sentence early next year.
“He was funny and liked to make people laugh, and very protective of me,” Sharon Myles-Stephens recalls of her brother. “In the neighborhood, he would go around helping all the old people.”
Around 2 AM, 16-year-old Shaharian Brandon, a sophomore at Near North High School and an All-American athlete, and 15-year-old Octavius Morris left Morris’s house near Washington and Cicero, not far from where Myles’s parents lived, to get something to eat. According to what Morris later told police, a man crawled out from under her front porch, yelled “This is a stickup!,” and pulled out a gun, as another man hid under the porch behind him. The man with the gun shot Brandon, hitting him twice in the upper chest and killing him. Morris ran away, hearing more shots ring out. Later, she returned to the scene.
Finally, on December 9, Myles was transferred to Cook County Jail, where for the first time in the 48 hours since his arrest he was given food and access to a phone. The state’s attorney’s office charged him with attempted robbery and murder.
