Man convicted in March 2024 Hugh Street shooting
- Jamie Duffy
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
Just a word to the young men wielding guns in this city. FWPD homicide does not mess around. You shoot someone and they will find you. They will hunt you down. You will quickly find yourself in a small room with two detectives who know more than you think they do.
If that victim dies, more than likely you will be charged with murder and find your name at the top of a probable cause affidavit.
And it will happen so fast you won’t have time to think about your next step.
Better off to just stay home and turn on Netflix.
Who knows what motivated Thristian Boykin to “race” to Hugh Street to shoot Byron Keith Curry dead just as the sun was setting on March 7 of last year.
But, according to Tesa Helge, chief counsel for the Allen County Prosecutor’s office, the 32-year-old “made a plan” to do just that.
Thursday, Boykin was found guilty of murder and using a firearm in the commission of a crime, a “gun enhancement” that can add 20 years on to a sentence. With murder carrying a sentence between 45 and 65 years, he is facing up to 85 years in prison.
According to a probable cause affidavit written by homicide detective Ben MacDonald, the shooter was immediately identified as a man wearing all blue sweats with “a big back and skinny legs,” a description given walking along the street with Curry.
Before Curry was shot nine times, he yelled “no bro” while pushing his walking companion aside, suggesting that Curry saved her life, court docs say.
Other witnesses looking out at that time of day or hearing the shots and checking out the street, corroborated the shooter’s blue sweats, adding that the shooter wore white socks and slippers.
With plenty of surveillance photos from the neighborhood, Fort Wayne police asked the public to identify the man running from the scene by issuing a grainy photo grabbed from one of those cameras. Quite a few called in to identify him as Boykin, according to court documents.
Phones associated with the defendant were collected and one phone tied him to the shooting scene right at 4:22 p.m. Surveillance video shows him running toward and away from the scene at that time, holding what seems to be a gun in his pocket.
Detectives also tied a dark colored Kia Cadenza to Boykin seen leaving the scene directly after the shooting via the east/west alley between Harmar and Gay streets, south of Lewis Street, MacDonald’s affidavit says.
Detectives located video from a Shell station shortly before the shooting that showed Boykin switching vehicles with a woman, she driving the Kia Cadenza, Boykin at the wheel of a rental white Mazda.
Inside the Shell station, Boykin is on camera wearing the same clothing he wore at the time of the shooting, court documents state..
They then drove the vehicles to Enterprise car lot across Lima Road where the Mazda is turned in and they both leave in the Kia.
Boykin’s defense attorney, Robert Scremin, argued in opening statements that the photos used in evidence were “unrecognizable” and told the jury “you’re not going to recognize anything” and the prosecutor was using “vague statements of what people remember seeing.”
What one man saw was unmistakable in the 911 call played in court. “Oh my god,” he said over and over again as he spoke to dispatch. With every answer, as he watched the body on the ground, he ended it with “oh my god.”
FWPD was there two minutes after the 48-year-old father of at least two boys was shot. One is 13 and is hurt beyond all pain or grief, according to a relative sitting in the gallery.
Helge and Rebecca Grove represented the state. Special judge Marianne Voorhees presided.
Boykin will be sentenced on April 7 at 8:30 a.m.
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