State v. Dean

STEPHENS, Judge.

The facts of this case are easily stated but hardly understood. Around 2:00 a.m. on 6 May 2004, twenty-two-year-old Reginald Johnson was outside an apartment complex on Weaver Street in Durham, where he lived with his mother. Nineteen-year-old Tyrone Lamont Dean (“Defendant”) and five other men, all of whom were members of the “Eight-Trey Crips” gang, were outside the apartment complex selling cocaine. The men mistook Reginald Johnson for a leader of a rival gang, the “Bloods.” According to one of the men who was with Defendant that night, the Crips “just ran down and started…