They say they don’t know why he did it — just that an “evil man” pulled the trigger, ending a 13-year-old boy’s life.
There was no bail granted and few hard answers given in the Friday morning arraignment of Csean “Shizz” Skerritt, 34, who’s accused of gunning down 13-year-old Tyler Lawrence on a Sunday morning last month.
Skerritt, clad all in black, didn’t say a word in court. His court-apoitned lawyer, David Leon, entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.
“I don’t know — we may never know,” an emotional Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden told reporters outside the Dorchester district court.
A few minutes earlier, inside a courtroom there, Assistant district Attorney Julie Higgins laid out the allegations, bare as they are: Tyler, of Norwood, was staying with his grandparents in Mattapan for the weekend, as he did periodically, when he went for a walk, listening to music shortly after 11 a.m. that Sunday morning Jan. 29.
Higgins said video cameras from the area show the boy just walking down the street. Another feed shows Skerritt, a purported heavy-hitter for the Morse Street gang, drive up nearby, get out and walk down Babson Street, where the two would then encounter each other, according to the prosecutor.
Skerritt crossed the street and fired five shots, killing the boy, before running away, gun in hand, Higgins said.
But why?
“There is no connection between this defendant and Tyler Lawrence,” Higgins said in court.
How could something like this just happen?
Hayden, outside, didn’t like that question.
“It doesn’t matter. We spend too much time worrying about who did what and why,” the DA said. “What we need to worry about is the heinous act that was committed by an evil man.”
Prosecutor Julie Higgins ran down Skerritt’s decades-long rap sheet, going back to juvenile attempted murder and running up through multiple firearms convictions — and subsequent parole violations once he got out of prison for them.
And that’s not even including the murder charge he caught in 2015, though he was acquitted of that.
Tyler’s killing brought vigils in his hometown of Norwood and Mattapan as loved ones and community members grappled for answers.
Judge Thomas Kaplanes ordered him held without bail, as Higgins requested, due to the severity of the charges and Skerrit’s history of ignoring court orders and violating parole.
The bail sheet for this case notes that and further reiterates, putting the case succinctly, “allegation of murder by shooting a minor multiple times — a person with no connection to him.”
It was actually the feds who nabbed Skerritt, who they have brought up on separate fentanyl-dealing charges. The FBI says he sold a confidential informant 55 grams of the powerful opioid just a few days after he’s accused of shooting the teenager.
Skerritt had been identified in the past as being from Attleboro, but he’s now been in federal custody for the past two weeks after the G-men caught him in a raid at a Columbia Road address that’s listed as his residence in now charging documents.
Authorities identified him as a member of the Morse Street gang, a small but active crew he’s been purported to be with since at least 2014, when cops wrote in a police report that he was an active gangbanger with a “penchant for violence involving firearms.”
Hayden said there’s no indication that this latest slaying had to do with any gang activity.
Skerritt is next due in Dorchester court March 17, but Higgins said she expects Skerritt to be indicted up to the superior court, which handles more serious cases like this, before then.
Skerritt’s attorney Leon, who didn’t say much throughout the hearing, did ask for more police reports, complaining that the current ones available were just a couple of paragraphs combined.
But the public isn’t allowed to see even those scant police narratives available — the courts took the unusual step of impounding much of the file, a step usually done with sexual-assault or domestic violence cases.
Justice Joshua Wall — a superior court judge — signed an order the previous say impounding the information away from everyone who’s not the homicide detectives on the case. Wall wrote that “the affidavit contains sensitive and detailed information concerning an ongoing death investigation” with “detailed descriptions of witnesses, including their location and various other important, undisclosed information.”
Further, he wrote, “disclosure of such information at this time would seriously jeopardize the ongoing death investigation” and “aide (sic) other fugitives from justice in making good their escapes.”
