Teen’s murder charge stuns friends

TACOMA – As a 17-year-old kid from a low income neighborhood, Cyril Walrond was a star: a class senator, a popular athlete, the recipient of a college scholarship paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Late last month, he spoke at a panel discussion on the educational disparity between white and minority students, saying, “In the community I live in, not many people will make it,” and adding that he aspired to be “a light in the darkness.”

Now, friends, relatives and classmates at Mount Tahoma High School are trying to reconcile the promising boy they know with the one Pierce County prosecutors describe in first-degree murder charges. Ten days before he served on the education panel, they say, Walrond swung a sheet-rock hammer as he and two friends beat and robbed a 55-year-old man, leaving him to die outside his home, his pants pockets turned inside-out.

“It appears to the prosecutor’s office that this was a thrill for them, to do this,” said Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Gerald Costello. “They have no criminal histories. They’re well thought of in the school setting. The police described them as bright, fairly well-spoken. It’s surprising to me – I say that as a prosecutor, a citizen and a parent.”

Charging documents filed Wednesday in Pierce County Superior Court say that shortly after midnight on April 20, Walrond, 18-year-old Daniel Harris and 16-year-old Jarrell Marshall first confronted a couple who had been strolling on a pier on Tacoma’s waterfront: Walrond hit the man in the head with the hammer, injuring him, and then the boys took their wallets and rifled through their car. They took compact discs, a cell phone and the man’s camouflage hat. Investigators, who said all three boys confessed, later wrote that they found the hat hanging on the wall of Walrond’s room, “like a souvenir.”

Less than an hour after the first attack, prosecutors say, the young men drove around, stopping when they saw Dien Huynh standing next to his car. Huynh had just come home from work.

The three surrounded him, and when Huynh tried to run, Harris tried to put him in a headlock, Costello wrote in an affidavit for probable cause. The man broke free, and Walrond ran him down and struck him on the head at least four times, investigators said. The boys allegedly grabbed his wallet and car keys and took off.

Huynh crawled onto his front porch, where a family member found him. He died two days later.

It isn’t clear what led police to Walrond, Harris and Marshall, all of whom are charged as adults and have pleaded not guilty to assault, robbery and murder. Costello said schoolyard gossip had indicated students were involved. Besides the camouflage hat, detectives said they found newspaper clippings about the killing in Walrond’s room. There were also clippings about a fatal beating in 2005, for which someone else has been convicted.

“He was real sweet. He talked to everybody and never was mean to anybody,” said Mount Tahoma sophomore Raven Hicks, who has been friends with Walrond since last year. “That’s why I couldn’t believe it when I heard. I’ve never seen him skip a class; I’ve never seen him smoking, never seen him drinking. He was always a good kid.”

At Mount Tahoma, where about half of the 1,850 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, Walrond and Harris were among a few dozen students awarded Achievers scholarships – worth about $20,000 each – from the Gates Foundation. The scholarships are for “talented, low-income students who have overcome difficult circumstances.”

The News Tribune newspaper of Tacoma, which covered the University of Puget Sound education panel Walrond served on, said Walrond told those present he planned to enroll in pre-med and psychology courses at the University of Washington. A photograph that ran in the newspaper in January 2005 shows him manning a shovel with two female classmates as part of the United Way’s “Youth Day of Caring.” He was helping clear land for a meeting space at Washington State University’s forest land in Bonney Lake.

Walrond, who is the son of a youth track coach, runs track himself and is on the varsity football team, was also recently elected prince of the school-districtwide African American Pageant.