BATH — When Tyon Shuron took the witness stand in his own defense Friday, he said he did not kill Andrew Sherman and had never been to Shuron’s home on Kimball Street in Richmond.

Shuron, 46, has been charged with murder in the death of Sherman and with witness tampering related to the case.

“Let me ask you: Do you know who killed Andrew Sherman?” Ronald Bourget, one of Shuron’s defense lawyers, said.

“No, I do not,” Shuron said.

Prosecutors have spent a week laying the foundation for the state’s case against Shuron, relying on information gathered from search warrants including of cellphones and his communications with Chanda Lilly, with whom he had a relationship and who has already pleaded guilty to robbery in connection with Sherman’s murder. As part of her guilty plea, Lilly agreed to testify against Shuron, and did so last week.

The prosecution rested Friday, and Shuron’s lawyers began making their case.

For more than two hours, Shuron recounted first for his lawyers and then under cross-examination by prosecutors how he was unaware he was linked to Sherman’s murder until January 2020, when he had taken Lilly to the Augusta police station to talk with officers about a problem she was having with a neighbor, and two police detectives approached him while he was waiting inside his car and asked to speak with him.

Shuron said he only understood police thought he was involved with the murder when he began reading the search warrant they had given him. He was arrested about two weeks later. And the next time he saw Lilly, he said, both were at Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset, after she had been arrested.

Shuron claimed that Lilly, who testified she has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, testified against him at the bidding of her parents, who are also her guardians. They were angry because of the secret relationship Shuron and Chanda Lilly had while Shuron was estranged from his wife, Chanda Lilly’s sister.

At the jail, prosecutors said, Shuron sent Lilly notes urging her to recant her testimony and be in contact with his lawyers.

But Shuron said he did not do that to get her help with his case. He said he wanted her to feel secure.

“I am not guilty of this,” Shuron said to Bourget. “I have confidence in your ability.”

Shuron said he wanted to help Lilly present the truth to whomever would listen, and he could help her organize her thoughts.

Jail guards eventually confiscated the notes when they discovered the correspondence.

While the gun used to shoot Sherman has never been recovered, law enforcement officials found a bullet from the scene and determined it came from a 9 mm Hi-Point handgun, the same kind of gun that Shuron had bought in 2016. The case for that gun was recovered from his car during the search.

Shuron said he was not sure how the case came to be there, and he had planned to get rid of the gun as a romantic gesture after Chanda Lilly expressed her concern about what might happen to him as a Black man if stopped by police and found to have the firearm.

Shuron said he had put the gun into a trash bag at his home during the summer of 2019, and he thought Chanda Lilly had taken out his trash can when he was not looking. When he looked later, he could not find the weapon. And when he checked his ADT security footage, there were gaps of up to four minutes in the recording, and it did not show her doing that.

Shuron also said he was aware of Lilly’s modeling career, which sometimes included explicit and graphic photo shoots, and it did not trouble him. And he said he did not object to Sherman’s having provocative photographs of Lilly at her home Sept. 25, 2019, as Lilly had testified. It took place a little more than three days before Sherman was murdered Sept. 29.

Under an hourlong cross-examination by Jennifer Ackerman, an assistant attorney general, Shuron said he had not objected to Lilly’s work as a model, including her posing for provocative or explicit photographs.

He said he did not know investigators had first contacted Lilly in mid-October and spoken with her about Sherman’s murder.

Shuron denied manipulating Lilly to stop taking her prescribed medications through a series of text messages recovered through the state’s search warrant.

“‘Did I catch a case? … Just caught a body but I never left a trace.’ Have you heard that song lyric before?” Ackerman said.

Shuron said it sounded familiar.

Ackerman said Shuron downloaded “Fefe,” the rap track containing those words at 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 29, 2019, onto a cellphone that had been discovered in the January 2020 search of Shuron’s car, and it was deleted from the cellphone Oct. 4, 2019, three days after prosecutors say Shuron drove to Appleton to dispose of garments he and Lilly wore at the time of the murder and electronic equipment they took from Sherman’s home.

For more than hour, Ackerman picked apart Shuron’s account of what had happened in the days leading up to and after Sherman’s murder, including about explicit photographs Shuron had taken of Lilly.

And when he wrote in notes exchanged at jail in Wiscasset that she should remember that they were together Sept. 28 and 29, he said he did not remember the date.

“I was trying to give her a more concrete alibi because I didn’t remember that date or whatever, and I wanted to make sure she was OK,” Shuron said. “I don’t really know what happened that day. This whole murder nonsense didn’t occur in my life experience, so there was nothing for me to remember.”

Sherman’s body was found nearly two weeks later — on Oct. 11, 2019 — by a friend who had stopped to check on him because he had not heard from Sherman and Sherman was not answering his telephone.

Shuron was arrested the following February, and Lilly was arrested weeks later in March. They were indicted in August 2020. This is now the longest-pending murder case in Maine.

The trial is scheduled to continue Monday at Sagadahoc County Superior Court in Bath.

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.

« Previous

MaineCare dental patients face long waits, drives for care

Next »

$1.6 million on the line for Wiscasset in dispute over nuclear waste facility