She was 18 years old, ranked among the best basketball players in the country, and on the verge of living out her biggest dream. College scouts were calling. Tennessee was watching. Everything she’d worked for her entire life was finally within reach. But on one September night in Harlem, three gunshots ended it all.
What followed would tear her family apart in ways nobody could have predicted. Because the real tragedy wasn’t just how she died. It was what her death turned her little brother into. You see, Taylor Murphy Senior had five kids in total, and every single one of them meant the world to him.
There was his daughter, Deanna, born back when he was still in high school, somebody he always stayed tight with no matter what life threw at them. Then came Tiffany’s two kids, Robert and Tasia, who Talon embraced and raised like they were his own flesh and blood. And finally, there was Tana and Talon Jr.
Now, everybody always wanted to know where the nickname chicken came from. Folks heard it so much that it became bigger than her real name. Tana usually laughed it off and told people it came from the way she walked, bow-legged as a little girl. But the real story went way deeper than that. Back in the spring of 1993, right before Taana was born, Tylon was celebrating heavy.
For two straight weeks, he was outside partying non-stop. One week before she arrived and another week after, he was hyped about becoming a father again. When he finally made it to the hospital to see his baby girl, he looked down at her and jokingly asked if that was really his daughter. Stephanie fired right back at him, clowning him for all the chicken he had been eating during his celebration run.
She joked that the baby looked like a little wet duck because of it. Of course, nobody was about to walk around calling a child duck, so the family settled on chicken instead. And just like that, the name stuck forever. By the time Tyana was around 6 years old, the family moved into the Queensbridge houses over in Long Island City. Queensbridge was huge.
The biggest public housing project in the entire country, towering over the neighborhood like its own city inside a city. That was where Chicken’s story really started taking shape. Talon coached youth basketball for both boys and girls, and he made sure his daughter played on both teams.
Tiffany used to worry herself sick watching it happen. Ta Shana suffered from severe asthma attacks and playing against boys looked like a recipe for disaster. But chicken was different. She wasn’t just surviving out there. She was cooking everybody. Boys, girls, didn’t matter.
She moved through defenders like they were standing still. As she got older, her confidence started going through the roof. She would bet people money before shots even left her hands. $10, 25, sometimes a hundred. She already knew the ball was dropping before it even touched the rim. One day during a one-on-one game, she crossed a dude so badly she literally broke his ankle.
While paramedics were trying to load him into the ambulance, Chicken stopped everything just to make sure she got paid first. That was her personality all over. Fearless, funny, competitive, and always talking her talk. Off the court, she loved dancing and writing poetry. But basketball, basketball was her heartbeat.
Taana started high school at Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School, even though bigger basketball powerhouses wanted her badly, but loyalty mattered to her and her father. Kasim Alustin, one of the people who helped shape her game early on, coached there, and Talon believed in sticking with the people who believed in you first.
Besides, Chicken already knew she was special. She didn’t need a famous school to make noise. She planned on making the school famous because she was there. And that was exactly what happened. As just a freshman, she landed on the front page of the local sports section while averaging 26 points a game.
The city was already buzzing about her. Everybody knew once Chicken stepped on the court, problems came with her. Eventually, Chicken transferred schools before landing at Murray Bertram High School, one of the top girls basketball programs in the country. The school itself didn’t exactly scream basketball dynasty.
Sitting near the Brooklyn Bridge, it originally opened as one of the nation’s first business focused high schools. But under coach Ed Grazinski, it became a powerhouse. When St. Michaels shut down, Tailon sat down with Grazinski privately, what stood out to him wasn’t just basketball. It was how seriously the coach took academics and how much he genuinely cared about his players.
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Honestly, Tailon’s mind was already made up. The only real problem was Ta Shana’s ACL injury. Chicken begged her dad not to bring it up because she wanted to get back on the court immediately. But Talon knew better. He knew the second she stepped onto that floor, she’d forget she was hurt and try to push through the pain like nothing was wrong.
After everything she went through during rehab, though, Chicken was finally starting to feel free again. Heading into her senior year, ESPN ranked her as the 16th best point guard in the nation. But Chicken never tried fitting inside anybody’s box. Some days she wore baggy men’s clothes.
Other days she switched up her hairstyle completely. Perms one week, braids the next. She carried herself however she wanted. Behind all of it stood the people closest to her. Her father Talon and her godfather Kasim Austin. Together, they built what everybody around them called team chicken. Tailon constantly pushed her to dream bigger than her circumstances.
He always told her to shoot for the stars because even if she missed, she’d still land on the moon. College recruiters started flooding in. The University of Miami became the first school to officially offer her after watching her dominate in Florida. She treasured the basketball they gave her with the Miami logo printed on it. Then there was St.
John’s University, which would allow everybody back home to watch her play regularly. Her former AAU teammate, Alisha Love It, had already gone to Cincinnati, too. But more and more, Virginia Commonwealth University started looking like the perfect fit. Their fast-paced style matched her game perfectly, and they offered the criminal justice program she wanted.
Still, one school stayed stuck in the back of her mind. University of Tennessee. That was the dream school. That was where Pat Summit built legends. That was where Shannon Bobbit played to Chicken. Tennessee represented basketball royalty. So, Coach Gresensinski decided to make a call. He reached out to Tennessee assistant Dean Lockwood to see if maybe the feeling was mutual.
On the evening of September 10th, 2011, Ton Murphy took the subway uptown to West Harlem to check on Chicken. When he pulled up to the building, he spotted her outside sitting on a bench with her friends, laughing, joking, just enjoying herself like any regular teenager on a Saturday night.
As he walked past her toward the lobby, he caught her attention and told her he needed to talk to her whenever she got the chance to come upstairs. Her senior year of high school had literally just started 2 days earlier, and Talon already knew she probably planned on staying outside late with her people. He wasn’t tripping, though.
He had something huge to tell her, something he knew would light her whole face up. A basketball scout from the University of Tennessee was finally coming to watch her play. At the time, Tashana was still living with her mother, her brothers, her sister, and her sister’s baby. Talon stopped by often, and that night, he made himself comfortable inside her room, surrounded by trophy after trophy from all the years she had been dominating on the court.
Not long before that, he’d gotten into a car accident, and his neck and back was still bothering him badly. So, he took a couple painkillers to ease the soreness while waiting for Chicken to come upstairs. But sitting there in that room, looking at all his daughter’s accomplishments around him, he accidentally drifted off to sleep.
Then, everything changed. A little after 4 in the morning on September 11th, Talon suddenly woke up to the sound of his son Talon Jr. screaming at the top of his lungs that somebody had shot chicken. Instantly, chaos exploded through the building. Screams echoed through the stairwell. Talon jumped up and took off, running down 11 flights of stairs as fast as he could.
When he reached the hallway, he saw his daughter lying there in a pool of blood. Tanazia was holding on to her sister, crying and begging her to wake up while somebody nearby screamed into her phone for 911 to hurry up and send help. But deep down, Tailon already knew what he was looking at. Chicken was gone. She had been shot three times.
Once in the wrist, once in the hip, and once in the chest. The wounds killed her almost instantly. Only hours later, workers from the medical examiner’s office wheeled her body out of the building inside a canvas bag while her mother walked beside the stretcher, gripping the metal rail the entire way.
And just like that, one of Harlem’s brightest young stars was gone forever. To this day, parts of what happened during those early morning hours still remain unclear. Taana lived inside the General Ulissiz Sgrant houses, a massive housing development made up of nine brick towers packed with nearly 4,500 residents.
Right nearby set the Manhattanville houses, another cluster of buildings housing thousands more people. Life in those projects was rough. According to housing data at the time, the average household income hovered around just $24,000 a year. While unemployment crushed huge portions of the community, the buildings themselves were falling apart, too.
Inside Chicken’s apartment, walls were crumbling, sinks were falling off, elevators constantly broke down, and repairs rarely came fast. But beyond the poverty and broken conditions, another problem had been brewing for years. A deep feud between the Grant Houses and Manhattanville houses.
And crazy enough, people said the whole thing may have started over a relationship drama years earlier involving a girl dating somebody from the rival projects. Uh eventually, neighborhood crews formed around the tension. Young kids from Grant called themselves Three Stacks, while youths from Manhattanville rolled with the Make It Happen Boys.
These weren’t major organized gangs like the Bloods or Crips. Most of the violence wasn’t even about money or drugs. A lot of it boiled down to pride, territory, boredom, and the constant pressure to prove something. On September 10th, tensions finally exploded. Witnesses described a huge fight breaking out between people from both housing projects that lasted for hours.
But even now, nobody fully agrees on whether Taunana or her family had anything to do with the conflict. Somewhere during all that chaos, investigators say two men, 20-year-old Robert Cardigina and 21-year-old Tyon Brochington, allegedly got their hands on a 9mm handgun. According to court documents, witnesses later claimed they saw 24year-old Tariq Collins carrying the weapon around Manhattanville around 3:00 in the morning.
Then less than an hour later, investigators said Carter Hana and Brockington were overheard talking reckless, allegedly bragging about going to smoke somebody from Grant Houses. Meanwhile, up on the 15th floor, Tishana’s mother, Tephany, watched panic unfold outside from her apartment window.
Moments earlier, Chicken had been downstairs dancing and laughing with her friends. Then, suddenly, she was running for her life. She sprinted into 3170 Broadway, rushed through doors that were supposed to stay locked, and bolted up the stairwell, trying desperately to escape. But by the fourth floor, she was trapped.
According to witness statements, Tana tried telling the men she wasn’t involved in whatever beef they had going on. The response she got back was cold and heartless. The shooter didn’t care. Instinctively, Chicken threw her arms up trying to protect herself. Tattooed across her forearm was a basketball alongside words saying, “Basketball wasn’t just a game, it was life to her.
” Seconds later, the gunfire rang out. Three shots. Tiffany ran from her apartment and became the first person to reach her daughter’s body. Covered in blood and completely shattered, she screamed asking why nobody opened their doors to help her child. By the time police arrived, Ta’s blood was all over her family.
After Chicken’s death, the person Tylon Murphy worried about most was his son, Tylon Jr., better known around the neighborhood as Bam Bam. Him and his sister were inseparable growing up. Everywhere one of them went, the other usually wasn’t far behind. They even looked alike.
Family members used to joke that spotting one automatically meant the other had to be somewhere close, too. Bam Bam absolutely idolized his big sister. But after Tashana was killed, rumors started flying all over Harlem. People began whispering that the shooters were actually hunting for Bam Bam that night and that chicken got caught in the middle by mistake.
Now, investigators never proved that theory, and later on, it completely fell apart during trial proceedings. Still, just hearing something like that hanging over a teenager’s head was enough to crush somebody mentally. Friends around Bam Bam could see the weight eating him alive.
According to people close to the family, he changed completely after losing his sister. The loud social kid everybody knew slowly disappeared. He became distant, quiet, shut off from the world around him. Talon said his son started trying to numb himself however he could. Some days Bam Bam wandered around looking completely gone, drunk, high, twisted up emotionally and mentally.
Even neighbors saw it happening in real time. People around the Grant Houses started saying that when Chicken died, a part of Bam Bam died, too. At the same time, the violence between the Grant Houses and Manhattanville only kept spiraling further out of control. Shootings became regular. One teenager got hit in the shoulder.
Another man got shot in the leg. Innocent bystanders kept ending up caught in crossfire from beefs they had nothing to do with. Meanwhile, Bam Bam was still living inside the grand houses with his mother, trying to survive in the middle of all that tension. Before long, trouble started finding him, too.
Near the end of 2012, he got arrested after an argument involving a cell phone turned into a burglary case. Because he was still young, the courts treated him as a youthful offender, and he ended up getting probation instead of serious prison time. But things didn’t slow down after that.
The following summer, Bam Bam found himself arrested again alongside four other people. Prosecutors accused them of attacking somebody from Manhattanville and robbing the victim for $100. Then came June 4th, 2014. Before the sun even came up, the sound of helicopter blades thundered across West Harlem. Residents woke up to flashing lights and sirens and police flooding the streets from every direction.
Around the same time, then NYPD Commissioner William Bratton posted a photo online showing himself standing in the middle of a huge police operation in Harlem, surrounded by officers from the gang division. That morning, nearly 500 police officers stormed through the Grant and Manhattanville houses. It was massive. The Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.
had just announced indictments against 103 young men tied to three neighborhood crews, three stacks, the Make It Happen Boys, and another crew called Money Avenue operating nearby. Prosecutors labeled it the biggest gang indictment case in New York City history. And the ages of the people swept up in it showed just how young the streets really were.
The youngest defendant was only 15 years old. The oldest was 30. Most of them were barely even old enough to legally drink. Years earlier, shortly after Vance took office, his administration created a special crime strategies unit that focused heavily on areas like West Harlem, places prosecutors considered violent hotspots.
According to the state, from 2010 onward, these neighborhood crews were linked to two murders. nearly 20 shootings that wounded people and dozens of other incidents where bullets flew but somehow missed their targets. One of those murder victims was Tana Murphy. The other was 18-year-old Walter Sumpter, who got shot in the chest while leaving a party in late 2011.
His killing still hadn’t been solved. By building one huge conspiracy case instead of isolated arrests, prosecutors believe they could completely shut down the ongoing cycle of retaliation between the crews before more people died. Officials described the strategy as attacking the violence at its roots so it couldn’t grow back.
And Harlem wasn’t the only place they used that method. Similar conspiracy cases had already been filed all across Manhattan. A huge part of those investigations relied heavily on social media. Police and prosecutors dug through more than a million social media pages while also listening to thousands of jail phone calls.
They gathered years of Facebook posts, online threats, rap lyrics, photos, and messages that they believe connected the defendants to violence in the streets. The indictments were packed with screenshots of young men talking reckless online, threatening rivals, bragging about shootings, and talking about revenge.
To prosecutors, those posts proved criminal intent and loyalty to neighborhood crews. But defense attorneys argued something completely different. They said most of these kids were just performing online, talking tough for attention, clout, and survival in an environment where looking weak could get somebody hurt.
Then around 6:00 in the morning that same day, Taylor Murphy got a phone call from Derek Haynes. And the news hit him like a truck. His own son, Bam Bam, was named in the indictment. At the time, Talon Jr. was already sitting in jail over another assault case from months earlier. But this situation was on another level entirely.
Now he was one of 36 alleged members of three stacks facing serious felony charges ranging from weapons possession and assault to attempted murder and conspiracy. By January of 2016, almost 8 months had passed since the massive police raids tore through West Harlem. But prosecutors still weren’t finished. That month, Manhattan prosecutors rolled out a brand new case charging four young men with the murder of 18-year-old Walter Sumpter.
According to investigators, all four were tied to the Three Stacks crew. One of the names on that indictment was Tailon Murphy Jr. Prosecutors claimed Sumpter was connected to a rival crew called Money Avenue and said he was deeply hated by members of Three Stacks. They also pushed another explosive allegation that Sumpter had helped track down the same 9 millimeter handgun used in the murder of Taana Murphy, better known as Chicken.
According to the state, that weapon later ended up in the hands of rivals who used it against three stacks members. Then prosecutors made a major strategic move. Instead of trying the murder case separately, they convinced the judge to merge it into the giant gang conspiracy case already hanging over Harlem.
Their argument was simple. All the violence, shootings, and retaliation were connected parts of one larger war between neighborhood crews. And honestly, that kind of move gives prosecutors a huge advantage. In conspiracy cases, the state doesn’t always need to prove somebody personally pulled the trigger on every crime.
If jurors believe a defendant was part of the group carrying out the violence, that alone can still lead to convictions. But the defense came into court swinging back hard. Tailon Jr.’s attorney, Patrick Brackley, called the murder case deeply flawed from the jump. He pointed out that there was no forensic evidence tying Murphy to the killing.
No fingerprints, no murder weapon, nothing physical placing the gun in his hands. Still, prosecutors built their case around motive and testimony. They argued that Murphy killed Walter Sumpter because Sumpter had publicly mocked the death of Chicken online after she was murdered back in 2011.
The whole situation felt tragically modern. Social media disrespect spilling into real life violence. The day Murphy officially got hit with the murder charge, his father sat alone inside the courtroom watching everything unfold. Talon Senior stayed quiet near the front row, his head tilted down, lips tight, carrying the weight of everything, crashing down around his family.
Back when the shooting happened, his son had only been 16 years old. Now he was 19 and staring at the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Core officers escorted Murphy into the room, wearing gray jail sweats and handcuffs behind his back. He barely spent a few minutes before the judge before deputies started leading him back out again.
As he passed by, he gave his father a small knob. That was it. Afterward, Talon Senior repeated the same thing he’d been saying from the beginning. His son maintained he was innocent. And no matter what happened, he still loved him deeply. But inside the courtroom, prosecutors kept building their case piece by piece.
Two witnesses took the stand claiming they saw Murphy shoot Walter Sumpter outside a party near 154th Street and Amsterdam Avenue on December 30th, 2011. According to their version of events, Murphy arrived alongside other Three Stacks members and challenged Sumpter to a fight before eventually pulling out a gun and firing into his chest while others around him hyped him up.
There was one major issue, though. Both witnesses were tied to rival crews themselves, specifically Money Avenue, and both were cooperating with prosecutors in exchange for lighter treatment in their own criminal cases. Then came another witness, somebody even closer to Murphy. A fellow Three Stacks member named Jayvon Brown, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, too.
Brown testified that while drinking together one day, Murphy supposedly admitted to the shooting. Brown also claimed Murphy showed him a Daringer pistol just weeks before Sumpter was killed. Adding another strange layer to the story, police had actually detained Murphy shortly after the murder happened. Investigators picked him up minutes after the shooting while he was running from the scene.
But because officers never recovered the gun, they had to release him only hours later. Murphy’s lawyer attacked the prosecution’s witnesses relentlessly. Brackley argued that every key witness in the case had major reasons to lie in order to save themselves. He told jurors they were hearing stories from gang members cutting deals, not reliable truth.
Then he started tearing apart the details. Two weeks before his death, Walter Ser had uploaded a video online disrespecting three stacks and mocking the murder of Chicken. Murphy responded online too, trading threats back and forth as the feud escalated publicly. But Brackley argued the actual physical evidence didn’t match the stories prosecutors were selling.
Walter Sumpter had been shot through the heart and lungs. Yet his body ended up nearly 240 ft away from where witnesses claimed the shooting happened. To the defense, that gap completely destroyed the credibility of the testimony. On top of that, witness descriptions didn’t even line up with each other.
One person claimed the shooter wore a yellow coat. Another described a tan jacket and hat instead. For the defense, it was proof the state’s witnesses were piecing together stories instead of telling facts. Brackley basically told jurors straight up that the prosecution’s entire narrative was built on lies.
But the murder case was only one piece of something much bigger. Prosecutors accused Murphy, known on the streets as BAM, of participating in a four-year campaign of violence alongside 35 other alleged Three Stacks members. Using conspiracy laws, the state tied together shootings, stabbings, robberies, slashings, assaults, and weapons charges under one giant case.
Their argument boiled down to this. If someone willingly joined the crew, they shared responsibility for what the crew did. Because of that, jurors heard evidence about violent crimes. Murphy wasn’t personally accused of committing shootings, slashings, rival attacks. The courtroom became flooded with years of Facebook posts, recorded jail calls, handwritten letters, and social media messages that prosecutors said proved gang members were coordinating violence, buying guns together, and plotting retaliation.
Assistant District Attorney Andrew Warshaw told jurors the streets operated through collective responsibility. According to prosecutors, everybody involved understood exactly what came with membership in those crews. Since there was almost no physical evidence directly tying Murphy to the murder itself, prosecutors leaned heavily on social media language and coded street talk.
Warshaw repeatedly urged jurors to read between the lines of posts and messages to understand the violence underneath them. And when it came time for closing arguments, prosecutors pushed back hard against any sympathy Murphy might receive because of where he came from. Warshaw argued that growing up inside public housing didn’t automatically turn somebody into a killer.
Then finally in April, the verdict day arrived. The courtroom was packed wallto-wall with family, friends, supporters, officers, and reporters all waiting to hear what would happen. When the verdict came down, emotions exploded instantly. One young man stormed out yelling in anger while tension spread across the room.
Judge Edward Mclofflin eventually stepped in trying to calm Murphy’s family, especially because a small child was sitting inside the courtroom during the chaos, but that rubbed Tailon Senior the wrong way completely. Walking into the hallway afterward, he could barely hide his frustration, furious over what he felt was disrespect toward his grieving family.
Meanwhile, prosecutors made one final painful argument during the proceedings. Warshaw suggested Murphy helped create the violent environment that ultimately led to his own sister’s death years earlier. Then the jury delivered its decision. Talon Murphy Jr. was found guilty not just for Walter Sumpter’s murder, but also for conspiracy, assault, robbery, and weapons possession tied to the broader three stacks case.
The murder conviction alone carried a sentence of 25 years to life. The second the verdict was read, Murphy’s mother, Stephanie Holston, broke down, screaming uncontrollably. Her cries echoed so loudly through the courthouse that proceedings had to pause while officers escorted her outside.
Inside the room, Murphy’s friends sat stunned, shaking their heads while court officers flooded the courtroom to stop things from spiraling further. Murphy himself barely reacted. He quietly leaned toward his lawyer and whispered something before deputies placed him back in handcuffs. As officers led him away, his father called out to him one more time, making sure his son heard that he loved him.
Afterward, Judge Edward Mclofflin thanked the jurors for handling such a dangerous and emotionally charged case. The risk surrounding the trial was so serious that jurors later had to be escorted home under heavy protection. Then came sentencing in June 2016. Murphy received a crushing sentence of 50 years to life.
Judge Mclofflin didn’t soften his words either. He blasted Murphy for ignoring every warning people had tried to give him over the years. Teachers, coaches, judges, probation officers. According to the judge, countless people had tried steering him away from the streets and away from three stacks before things reached this point.
Mclofflin even criticized Murphy for bringing rosary beads into court, suggesting jurors may have viewed it as manipulation instead of genuine faith. Then the judge zoomed out to the bigger picture, talking about neglected communities, broken systems, drug use, failing education, and how normalized guns had become in certain neighborhoods.
Still, he admitted the justice system alone couldn’t undo years of damage done to kids growing up inside those environments. Inside the courtroom, prosecutor Andrew Warshaw argued that Murphy and others like him fueled the exact violence that destroyed their own communities. He reminded the court that the overwhelming majority of residents living inside the Grant and Manhattanville houses wanted nothing to do with the shootings and gang wars tearing the neighborhood apart.
Then Walter Sumpter’s father addressed the court. Despite losing his son, he spoke with surprise and grace. He said his family understood they weren’t the only ones suffering and even expressed hope that Murphy might someday find repentance. When it was finally Murphy’s turn to speak, he briefly offered sympathy to the Sumpter family before once again insisting he was innocent.
He said he understood the pain of losing a sibling and thanked his supporters for standing beside him, making it clear he still planned to keep fighting his conviction. Outside the courthouse afterward, Talon senior gathered Murphy’s supporters around him and told them not to lose hope.
Then he left them with one final message. The judge had predicted many of them eventually would stop showing up for his son. Talon senior challenged them to prove that prediction
