close
close

Tyrese White is sent to prison for the death of Anthony Boyd

play

A man who fatally shot a Mount Vernon teenager three years ago was sentenced Thursday to 21 years in prison, a sentence the victim's mother said was not enough for the devastation he caused.

“You killed us when you killed Anthony,” Yvonne Boyd told Tyrese White, 22, in Westchester County Court. “We died with him.”

White's May 6, 2021, killing of 17-year-old Anthony Boyd Jr. occurred during a botched gun purchase.

White and Christopher Mills had agreed to buy a gun from Boyd outside the South Eighth Avenue home where Mills lived. After Boyd arrived, White shot him in the chest and took the gun Boyd was trying to sell before he and Mills ran through backyards down Tenth Avenue to a house a few blocks away.

Mills pleaded guilty earlier this year and was promised a 12-year sentence.

White was spared a possible life sentence for a murder conviction when prosecutors agreed last month to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter in exchange for the 21-year sentence ordered by state Supreme Court Justice James McCarty, imposed on Thursday.

Anthony Boyd Sr. spoke at the sentencing, recalling the morning his son was killed. He said they had a meeting regarding Anthony Jr.'s upcoming high school graduation. His son told him he would go out first and come back soon, but he never did.

He thanked the Mount Vernon Police Department for helping him get some measure of justice. And he said any efforts to defund police departments across America are misguided because it is police in urban areas that have kept black-on-black crime from getting even more out of control than it is .

Anthony Boyd Jr.'s mother to White: 'You wiped us out'

Yvonne Boyd said people can't live forever, so they have children to “sustain our lives”.

“You destroyed ours. You wiped us out,” she told White.

She also thanked the Mount Vernon Police Department. But she thought about how Anthony Jr. wouldn't have met White if they hadn't lived in the city.

She said she comes from a war zone in Liberia and expects the United States to be a safe place to raise her child.

“The security that we came here to benefit from, you have taken away from us,” she told White.

Defense attorney Anthony Mattesi said White had a difficult upbringing and was confident he would turn his life around while incarcerated. White refused to speak when given the chance.

Yvonne Boyd said she doesn't forgive White. She called 21 years in prison “a slap on the wrist” for a murderer who came out of prison as a young man with the rest of his life ahead of him.

“Anthony won’t be here,” she told him. “He can’t be here.”

You may also like...