What Went Wrong? -- Tyrell Johnson Was Young, Black, Male - And Murdered

Their friendship had all the makings of a cliched movie script: rich, white suburban kid befriends needy, black inner-city youth.

Only this time there's no happy ending.

It began when John Doces' family in Yarrow Point sponsored a Christmas celebration for Tyrell Johnson and his family in the Central Area through a community program. The boys, then 13, became buddies, sharing an attraction to sports, girls and hanging out. Cultural differences seemed to diminish as they spent more time together.

But as the two grew into adulthood, the roads to their futures began to diverge. Doces and his friends at Bellevue High School talked about attending college; Johnson and his friends spoke of gangs and the boredom of the schooling they'd left behind.

This summer, 19-year-old Doces lives in a fraternity house at the University of Washington, waiting to begin his sophomore year of college.

On a brilliant, hot summer day recently, Johnson was buried. His body had been found, wrapped in a bedspread, in a wooded ditch in Rainier Valley on Aug. 10. His killer shot Johnson once in the head, cut off his legs and tried to sever one arm. His legs are still missing.

Now Doces grieves for his friend, wondering if there might have been anything he could have done to alter the path of Johnson's life. Doces' conclusion?

"If Tyrell had had my life, he'd be in the same place I am if not better," says Doces. "I'm positive of that. It's his circumstances and where he grew up that caused his death."

Doces uses the analogy of traveling down a highway to contrast the two lives. For Doces, a doctor's kid, the exits leading to failure are few and far between, with numerous re-entrance ramps. For Johnson, "there was really no road to begin with down there. He didn't have much of a chance to get going," said his friend.

It's easy to look at the crossroads of Tyrell Dorrion Johnson's life and see where he might have made the wrong turns - the chances that were there but not taken, from playing in a national basketball tournament to attending a private high school on scholarship.

It's just as easy to view Johnson's death as yet another mark on the tally of young African-American men who die violently. The statistics are staggering: Violence is the No. 1 cause of death for black males between the ages of 15 and 25; their murder rate is 10 times that of their white counterparts.

Also, Johnson's apparent drifting in and out of a gang only increased his chances of getting in trouble, as did his lack of employment.

His family and friends, though, call that kind of labeling unfair and offensive to Johnson's memory. He didn't fit the gang mold; he wasn't rebellious; he still lived with his parents and showed respect for them.

And most of all, they say, no matter what it was that made someone mad at Johnson, he didn't deserve to die in that grisly fashion.

So why did Johnson take this path, moving away from basketball just as he was starting to excel, dropping out of school, accumulating a criminal record? How did he end up casually leaving his home one summer afternoon to meet a friend, never to return?

Parents Douglas Johnson and Viola Grace tell of a quiet childhood for their only son, born when they were 19 years old. Tyrell attended Sunday school at Beacon Hill First Baptist Church and lived his life in the same apartment complex on 21st Avenue and East Jefferson Street.

Tyrell had a half brother, Donnico, only six months older, and the two were close, said their father. Tyrell also had an older half sister, his mother's daughter, and a sister five years his junior.

Though his mom and dad never married, the couple speak of their relationship as steady over the years. They have a large extended family in the Puget Sound area.

Douglas Johnson remembers his son winning a spelling bee in fifth grade and topping talent shows with some fancy break dancing. "He never gave us any problems," adds Grace.

Sports soon took center stage in Tyrell's life, as evidenced by the 13 trophies sitting on a shelf at home. He played football because his friends did, but basketball really grabbed hold of him.

His junior-league-football coach, Alex Duran, echoes that Tyrell never was any trouble. He played well enough to be on both the offense and defense, as tight end and lineman.

But it was in basketball that Tyrell shone. Willie McClain, his coach for six years, says Tyrell was one of his best players. He could have played guard on any varsity high-school team in the Metro League, and even had a shot at college ball, his coach said.

Doces said he and Tyrell often played pickup ball when they'd get together on weekends: "He was a naturally gifted athlete." Johnson talked of playing college basketball at Los Angeles' Loyola Marymount University, an offensive powerhouse, and then going on to pro ball. His 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds made it unlikely, but still he dreamed.

Tyrell's dreams were set against a life that started to change around the eighth grade. He had a minor brush with the law, a misdemeanor conviction for theft. His father started spending half of each year in Alabama, taking care of an ailing family member. The Central Area was being infiltrated by gangs in 1986, and many of his friends were abandoning school and joining.

"Kids get a certain age, they still listen to you, but they do what they want," said Douglas Johnson. "You can't be with your kids all the time and you can't pick their friends."

In eighth grade, Tyrell was part of an experiment by McClain and other African-American coaches: to pull together a basketball team from the Central Area and the private Lakeside School. "We thought it was a good idea to expose these different kids to each other, to combine inner-city kids with rich white kids. And it worked," McClain said.

The team won area tournaments and an invitation to a 1986 national tournament in Florida. Yet Tyrell refused to go on the trip and dropped off the team, surprising McClain.

"The trip was a chance for these inner-city kids to understand there's a lot more to the world out there than 23rd and Jefferson or Cherry," said McClain. "Tyrell needed a chance to be in a different place. I was sorry he didn't come with us."

McClain thinks Johnson didn't travel south with the team because he felt bad about declining an offer to go to private high school. The team's coaches had put together a tutoring program, support group and financial aid for enrollment at Seattle Prep or Blanchet High School. Johnson was targeted for one of the four slots in the pilot program.

"He had enough talent, enough gifts in sports to soften the blow of being in a private school," said McClain. "He was a smart young man; there wasn't any (school) work he couldn't do. We put a lot of pressure on him, and we actually tried to force him to go."

But Tyrell said no. It was too big a risk - and uncool - to leave friends, go across town and be the first group of African Americans to attend a nearly all-white school, McClain said.

Johnson spent his freshman and sophomore years at Garfield, the high school near his home. He played basketball the first year, but then had problems with grades.

He left Garfield in April 1988 and enrolled in Sharples Alternative School that September. But Johnson was dropped from Sharples his junior year for nonattendance, Principal Roscoe Bass said.

Douglas Johnson shakes his head in frustration at his son's failure to finish school. "He had started hanging out in the streets, staying out late, and he came up with lots of excuses for not going to school. He wanted to start growing up."

Right before he left school, March 9, 1989, Johnson pleaded guilty to a drug charge. Less than a year later, he was charged with his first felony as an adult, for a cocaine transaction near Seward Park.

"Both he (other suspect) and Johnson are associates of `Blood' gang members and may flee the jurisdiction," court documents state.

Adonaca Walker, a friend of two years, gets angry when she hears or reads of Johnson's alleged gang connections. "He was not in no gang. Just because you have friends in gangs doesn't mean you're involved. If you grew up around people, you can't just ignore them because they're a gang member. Half of our age are gang members."

His father, sitting in his son's tidy bedroom with its giant stuffed Mickey Mouse, said he often asked Tyrell if he was involved in a gang, warning him they offered only jail or death.

" `No daddy, I'm not in gangs,' " Tyrell would answer his dad. " `I know them, we used to play basketball together; we went to school together. They're just my friends.' "

Douglas Johnson said that when he was in Seattle he tried to keep close tabs on his son, checking his room for any signs of drugs or a gun. He never found evidence, the father said, and Tyrell denied using or having either.

John Doces noticed some changes in his friend about two years ago, but never came right out and asked him about gangs. "Inside, I guess I really didn't want to know," he said. "It wouldn't have made me feel less of him, anyway."

Still, the two friends had conversations about the BGDs, the Black Gangster Disciples. The gangs offered security, strength in numbers and peer acceptance, Johnson would tell Doces. "He'd talk about the fine line between being in and not in a gang."

Some BGDs and other gang members attended graveside services for Johnson, watched carefully by a host of police officers.

Detective Hank Gruber said Seattle police doubted the death was related to gangs or drugs.

The police are still searching for a friend of Johnson, Michael Sylvester Scott, 20, who is missing and presumed dead. The two men were last seen together Aug. 9, at a gambling club in the Central Area. Speculation is that the pair won a lot of money, were robbed and then silenced.

His attorney thinks instead of gang membership it was being a loyal friend that got Johnson into situations he should have avoided.

"He had regret about being with people he shouldn't be with," said public defender Martin Powell. "It was always my sense he wasn't the instigator."

Court documents describing Johnson's three felonies between 1990 and his death support Powell's words.

In the cocaine buy, Johnson was in the car as another man made the deal. In a charge for possession of stolen property, Johnson was caught with a stolen $850 cellular phone, which he said he had bought on the street hours earlier. And in a residential burglary case, Johnson was the lookout man. Johnson served 20 days on the drug charge in August 1990, and then six weeks for the other charges this spring. He was released May 1.

"He seemed somewhat resigned to being in jail," said public defender Martin Powell. "It always struck me as unusual for someone 18, 19 years old."

The attorney calls Tyrell one of his favorite clients because he was so likable, and Powell had talked with him about going back to school or getting job training.

"He was a young 19-year-old, almost naive and very soft-spoken," said Powell. "I don't think he felt like he had a lot of hope, a lot of direction. The whole thing makes me sad."

Johnson's death doesn't make a lot of sense to a whole lot of people. In hindsight, they look back at his life and question what might have been different.

"Had he been in a different environment or raised in a different city, something like this wouldn't have happened at all - I clearly sensed that," said Powell. "I think the Central District is a tougher place than people realize and Seattle is a hard city for black people."

Coach McClain wishes there was something "that could have turned Tyrell around. I wish I could give an A-B-C recipe for why these kids turn out the way they do. Tyrell was a level-headed kid; he knew values and he knew trouble when he saw it. It's so many different things that can go wrong."

John Doces' mother, Julie Doces, remembers picking up Tyrell for overnight stays at the family's Eastside home. "I had a feeling in that neighborhood, there wasn't a real escape route. He was such a wonderful kid with a thoughtful gaze, never jealous of what we had and he didn't.

"He was a good kid who got sucked in," she continues. "If it can happen to Tyrell, it can happen to anybody."

Doces likes to remember his friend Tyrell flying high on the basketball court, not as he last saw him, lying in a bronzed-wood casket.

"He wanted to do something but it was his neighborhood that got him," said Doces. "He was a tough kid who could take care of himself, but that wasn't good enough this time."