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HAMPTON — An 18-year-old Hampton man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the killing of a pre-med student outside a Buckroe Beach home June 2021.
Zakwan J. Tyler — who was 16 at the time — walked out of his mother’s home with a gun, headed immediately toward the two women fighting with his mother and shot one in the chest.
Raegan Sharnae Chisley, a 20-year-old student at North Carolina Central University who was home in Hampton for the summer, collapsed on the street.
She died a short time later at Hampton Sentara CarePlex, with a medical examiner testifying at a February trial that a bullet had pierced her heart.
At a sentencing hearing Thursday, Hampton Circuit Judge Michael Gaten said young people increasingly seem to think nothing of resolving petty differences with a gun.
“We’re losing a generation,” Gaten said. When someone kills another, he said, “they’re cutting off all their talents and gifts and cutting off their whole future,” as well as their own.
Though discretionary state sentencing guidelines called for a sentencing range of about 2-6 years, Gaten gave him the maximum of 10 on a voluntary manslaughter charge, suspending only the one-year sentence on a misdemeanor count of possessing a gun as a juvenile.
It was on June 22, 2021, that Chisley’s best friend — Tyler’s cousin — asked her to go with her to Tyler’s home to get cash and marijuana the cousin believed Tyler stole from her.
The cousin, Khadijah Newsome, testified at trial that Tyler stole about $500 in cash and weed when they were living in the same house weeks earlier.
The money, she said, included gifts from her high school graduation and tips from her restaurant job.
Beginning the night before, Newsome exchanged text messages with Tyler and his mother, Lisa Royal — whom Newsome called “my favorite aunt.” But though she thought Royal would help get her money back, it didn’t work out that way.
When Newsome and Chisley arrived at the home on Berkley Drive before 6 p.m., Tyler was inside playing video games, Newsome said. She said the teen laughed at her and denied stealing anything.
The women began arguing. Royal, who told the women she believed her son when he said he didn’t steal anything, at one point walked across the street to Chisley’s car and punched her in the face through the window.
Only about 30 seconds into an ensuing street fight, Tyler walked out of the house with the gun, shot Chisley, and ran. He was found 15 days later holed up at a Newport News motel.
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Prosecutors had charged him with first-degree murder, saying he had time to think about his actions. But defense lawyers contended he acted in “the heat of passion” to defend his mother.
The jury convicted him of manslaughter, which cut the maximum prison time he faced to 10 years rather than the possible life term for first-degree murder. They convicted him of a misdemeanor count of having a gun as a minor, with another possible year to serve.
At Thursday’s sentencing hearing, Chisley’s mother, Shaneya Jackson, called her daughter “her best friend” with whom she could talk about anything.
Chisley’s two brothers — now aged 15 and 11 — are struggling with it, too, she said, with one of them sleeping with the light on and not going outside. Chisley would also call her grandparents every day at 9:30 p.m.
“Not 9:29,” Jackson said. “Not 9:31, not 9:32.”
Jackson said the grandfather now doesn’t take calls between 9:30 and 10 o’clock because that’s the time he would have talked to Chisley. As for the date of the incident, Jackson said her daughter was simply trying to help her friend and “didn’t think her life was in danger.”
“I want him to go to jail for the maximum time,” Jackson said of Tyler.
Chisley’s father, Terry Chisley, called Raegan “my baby girl, my pork chop.” He lamented that while he’s helped a lot of neighborhood kids turn their lives around, “I couldn’t save my own daughter.”
“I have been robbed,” he said, saying that Raegan had nothing to do with the dispute between Tyler and his cousin. “I have a hole in my soul that can’t be filled and I don’t know if I will ever be happy again.”
Raegan, he said, would remember everyone’s birthday and “make sure that you were acknowledged.”
“I miss hearing her voice,” he said. “I miss hearing her walking up the stairs. I miss hearing her bracelets colliding while she’s walking.”
But instead of attending her college graduation at North Carolina Central or later seeing her putting on her white doctor’s coat, Terry Chisley said he gets to attend Tyler’s sentencing hearing. The father called for the maximum sentence “plus some.”
Hampton Chief Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Karen Rucker called for the maximum time on the combined charges, or 11 years to serve.
Rucker lamented the loss of the “free-spirited and glamorous” young woman who “loved the elderly, loved children,” and “always wanted to find a way to help people.”
The weekend before Raegan Chisley was killed, she spent time helping Tyler learn how to drive her car, Rucker said.
One of Tyler’s defense lawyers, Assistant Public Defender Darja Meskin, said Tyler made a “dumb” decision to “steal some weed from his cousin,” setting in motion the chain of events that led to the more poor decisions and the killing.
“He’s a kid who made a terrible decision that destroyed the lives of dozens of people,” Meskin said. But she said “Zakwan’s life is worthy of redemption,” and that “he will live with what he did for the rest of his life.”
Meskin asked for a sentence within state discretionary guidelines.
Tyler declined to address the judge, but Meskin read a letter he wrote to him. The teen said he was “really sorry for the pain he caused,” and that thinking about what happened makes him “sad and ashamed.”
“I wish I could go back and undo what I did,” Tyler wrote. “If there’s anything I could do to bring Raegan back, I would do it. She was a good person and like a sister to me. She didn’t deserve this, and I will live with it forever.”
In handing down the maximum sentence on the manslaughter charge, Gaten said everyone who comes before him has dignity and worth, alluding to the passage in Genesis of humans being made in God’s image.
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Gaten said he attended a recent meeting at which judges were discussing how far behind all the courts are on jury trials following the pandemic. But when he suggested that if violent crime goes down, “maybe we can catch up.”
But the other judges “chuckled,” he said, and one said, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”
“That made me sad,” Gaten said. Society, he said, seems to accept gun violence as “the normal course of business.”
Killings stemming from fights among young people with easy access to guns are “just as pervasive” and just as hurtful to families as the killings that garner national headlines.
He also told Tyler that his mother “failed you” by apparently making him think it was OK to pick up a gun during the fight. After the hearing, Royal declined extensive comment, but said she never taught Tyler that using a gun was the way to resolve disputes.
“He doesn’t know me,” she said.
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com