Tyler’s Tree: A Celebration of Life, A Mother’s Resilience to Keep Search For Son’s Killer Alive
By John W. Fountain
The small Christmas tree glistened, adorned with ornaments emblazoned with faces of life. Tiny ornamental portraits, they hung in tearful memory of the dead. Of sisters, daughters, brothers, and sons murdered. As a symbol of one mother’s resilience and hope and her determination to see her son’s killers brought to justice, still. Even 10 years after he was slain.
On Dec. 22, that mother, Delphine Cherry, of south suburban Hazel Crest, and her family held a candlelight ceremony commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the unsolved murder of her son Tyler Randolph to bring attention to unsolved murder cases in the south suburbs of Chicago that are not immune from burgeoning gun violence. The mother, along with family and friends, hung ornaments in remembrance of Tyler and other victims of violence three days before Christmas.
Among those victims was also Tyler’s sister, Tyesa Cherry, Delphine Cherry’s eldest child who was gunned down in 1992, as she left a movie theater in downtown Chicago — an innocent bystander slain at 16.
Three days before Christmas in 2012, 20 years after Tyesa’s death, Tyler was fatally wounded outside the family’s suburban home, inflicting more pain than any mother should have to bear.
As a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I chronicled Delphine Cherry’s story, the murder of Tyesa and the family’s emotional two-year journey through the criminal justice system that led to the ultimate murder conviction in 1994 of Tyesa’s 14-year-old killer. Through that journey as reporter and subject, we became friends, family. Indeed in Christmas 1994, I invited Delphine and her children, Tamika, Tyler and Tracii to our house for Christmas dinner. I remember Tyler as a little tyke, full of life, joy, promise.
Over the years, as my career carried me away from Chicago, I lost touch with Delphine. Then, as fate would have it, I climbed one morning on the treadmill at my south suburban gym, and there nearby was Delphine. We reconnected.
When I began to write a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times in 2010, Delphine’s story was among the first I wrote — bringing light to the trauma that so many mothers and their families suffer when they lose a child to murder. The fact that the pain and sense of loss never goes away.
Tyler, then a teenager, a man-child, his mother’s joy and only son, was there that winter’s January day as I reported the family marking 18 years since Tyesa’s slaying by laying flowers at her gravesite. Less than three years later, Tyler was fatally shot outside the family’s home in Hazel Crest.
His case remains unsolved. And the pain of one mother who lost two children to gun violence lingers like frostbite.
The words that appear below are a tribute I gave Dec. 23, 2022, at my sister Delphine’s request as she and family and friends gathered to remember Tyler — and Tyesa and other murder victims. In Chicago alone this year, through Dec. 22, at least 687 people had been murdered, according to Chicago Police with a total of 2,787 people shot.
It amounts to, in my opinion, a tragedy of epic proportions. A tale of blood and tears. A pain no mother should have to bear. A story worth telling again and again and again. Until a change comes.
This is a human rights issue. And there is no greater injustice than the unjustified taking of human life.
Strange Fruit
My brothers — our brothers and our sisters — daily perish.
Decades after the Ku Klux Klan rained down terror in the Deep South,
where black men dangled with bulging eyes
burned as “strange fruit” from poplar trees —
as Sunday sport from hatred’s seed.
Lynched by day and also by night.
Underneath a smoldering torch or soft moonlight.
By the thousands, we now perish
In urban streets across this land.
Decades after having won our civil rights by struggle’s hand.
But today being denied by our own brothers a basic human right:
The right to live
And not die
Lying in pools of our own blood. As bullet-ridden corpses.
On porches and in cars. In gangways and alleys.
Beneath the stars.
We perish — mostly another black male slain by another black male.
So many lives extinguished, so many lost we cherished:
Sons. Fathers. Grandsons. Grandfathers.
Our seed spilled in our own “village,” where our streets — city and suburban — now bleed.
Daughters. Mothers. Granddaughters. Grandmothers.
Their carnage also feeds this murderous scourge that fuels my words.
A scourge that begs mentioning: That whether twisting from southern trees,
or lying twisted as gunshot-felled carcasses in northern streets —
Both bear an uncanny resemblance to lynching.
Whether it is by white murderers who once came, clad in white sheets by night;
Or black murderers, who now come, clad in hoodies by day, in plain sight;
Both inflict bloody terror in the same rite.
Whether by rope or by gun, it is the same sum:
The demise of a nation. Annihilation the only aim.
And yet, to make this claim:
— That we have become our own worst enemy —
is to draw the ire of so many who can’t see, or else won’t see,
this relentless toll that stains our streets.
A toll imposed by someone who looks so much like them
so much like me.
I believe that there is no more critical an issue of our time than the scourge called Murder.
This is a human rights issue
And there is no greater injustice than the unjustified taking of human life.
We must work toward solutions
Do More than Talk
Seek to cure this scourge that no family should suffer
And we must remember, honor, uplift and never forget those who have been slain
Tyler should be here today
— here living, laughing and loving —
upon the winds of this mortal life
His physical presence and breath too soon gone
And yet, not his light…
For the light of Tyler Randolph
— symbolized by Tyler’s tree —
that touched all those who loved and knew him,
is a light not extinguished
A light still burning
Still flickering
Still present & effervescent
Still gloriously shining bright
And his voice still crying out for justice
for those who took his life
For an end to this great tragedy and violation
Of that most precious human right:
The right to live
And not die
The right to live
And not die
Tyler Randolph…
Say his name
Say his name
Say his name
Amen
#JusticeForJelaniDay
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
