Boy Who Watched Brother Murdered in 1994 Now a Man Convicted of Murder

By Chuck Sudo in News on Apr 5, 2011 3:45PM

Normally the news of a young black man sentenced to prison for murder would get a passing glance in the media. This story is a bit different as the young black man at the center of the story, Derrick Lemon, was once a primary figure in another murder case 17 years ago. Lemon was sentenced yesterday to 71 years in prison for murdering his aunt's boyfriend during a family barbecue in 2006. In 1994, Lemon tried in vain to keep two other youths, ages 10 and 11, from throwing his younger brother Eric Morse fourteen stories from the Ida B. Wells housing projects to his death because Morse wouldn't steal candy for them. Lemon at one pint was hanging on to his brother, but let go when one of the youths bit his hand, and he tried to run down the stairs to save his little brother.

Lemon's attorney's asked for leniency in his sentencing, citing the lasting trauma he's suffered from his brother's murder and saying that Lemon was another man who fell through the cracks. Judge Thomas Hennelly told Lemon that the trauma he suffered from watching his brother murdered saved him from a harsher sentence:

“It wasn’t society that directed you to put bullets into Illya Glover,” the judge told Lemon, recounting how Lemon had opened fire after Glover tried to prevent him from choking his aunt, and then, after being charged with murder, threatened witnesses on the eve of his trial.

“It wasn’t society that had you home-invade the witnesses in this case in an attempt to thwart the prosecution,” Hennelly said. “It was you. It was your choices, and it was your decision.”

Lemon, who dropped out of high school and was convicted by a jury in July last year, killed Glover at the barbecue in the 400 block of West 57th Street “the way someone would just swat an insect, without any remorse, without any thought whatsoever,” the judge said.

Morse's death prompted the Illinois General Assembly to pass a law lowering the age a child could be sent to juvenile prison and the federal government taking over the Chicago Housing Authority. Over at Chicago magazine, Whet Moser crafted a compelling timeline to argue that Lemon did, indeed, fall through the cracks.