Accomplice Convicted In Revenge Shooting

Note from the webmaster of www.tincher.to: This article was on the Washington Post website at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31056-2001Feb5?language=printer but they removed it in the summer of 2005. Here are the most important excerpts from the article. Gun control lobbyists like Million Mom Marcher Barbara Lipscomb/Graham support gun control because they want to prevent their victims from shooting back.

A bereaved mother convicted last week of trying to avenge her son's slaying had an accomplice by her side, a D.C. Superior Court jury decided yesterday.

Last week, jurors returned a verdict convicting Barbara Graham of nine counts stemming from an attack on a man she believed killed her son. But the jury couldn't decide whether her co-defendant, Erskine Moorer, was also guilty.

Yesterday, after being sent back into deliberations, jurors returned guilty verdicts on the same nine counts of which they convicted Graham.

Moorer, 30, of Fort Washington, and Graham, 49, of Capitol Heights, were accused of seeking vengeance for the death of 19-year-old Le'Pierre Clemons, who was slain last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

On the evening of Jan. 26 last year, Kikko Smith, then 22, was watching television at home when two friends called for him to join them in a car outside.

At the trial, Smith testified that Graham confronted him as he emerged from his home and asked, "Are you Kikko?" He said he answered yes and Graham asked him again, then reached in her purse and pulled out a gun.

Driver Jermaine Drummond said he told passenger Walthon Chester Lee Jr. to tell Graham that Smith did not kill her son. Lee testified that he saw Graham "fumbling around in her bag, and she pulled out a gun."

In the courtroom, Smith pointed out Graham and Moorer as his assailants. He and his friends testified that the armed pair chased Smith, who ran from a hail of bullets that eventually brought him down in a parking lot in the 2400 block of Elvans Road SE.

Smith said that after he was hit by three bullets and he fell face down on the pavement, Moorer stopped to tell Smith he was sorry as he fled the scene.

Smith's injuries have left him paralyzed from the waist down. Police said Smith, who testified from a wheelchair, remains in a hospital with a bullet in his spine.

Prosecutors said Graham might have misunderstood Smith, thinking he said, "Teacco," the name of another young man she suspected was involved in her son's slaying. Police said neither he nor Smith killed Clemons.

Nearly three months after Clemons was shot, police arrested and charged Daniel William Jackson Jr., 20, a childhood friend of his.

Graham was frustrated early on by the pace of the investigation and was convinced that she knew who killed her son.

Graham and Moorer, the boyfriend of Graham's daughter, each face 15 years to life in prison on each of the three most serious assault charges when they are sentenced this year.