Witness says man led East Side raid that killed toddler
Quentin Phillips took three men who looked up to him and went to shoot up the home of a rival in a drive-by raid that killed a 4-year-old boy, a state witness testified at Phillips’ murder trial Thursday.
Entering the courtroom handcuffed and in shackles, Charles Lee Bethany confirmed to jurors that he was awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges and hoped his cooperation might lessen his punishment.
On the night of July 19, 2017, when De’earlvion “Little Earl” Whitley was killed, Bethany was at one of his two East Side drug houses that federal agents already had under surveillance — because they already had Bethany himself under surveillance.
They were places where he would sometimes swap drugs for guns with associates that included Phillips, he said.
Little Earl was playing video games with his brother shortly before midnight at their home in the 200 block of Hub Avenue when one of the 65 bullets shot from a passing car killed him instantly. His mother, Cyntwanisha Whitley, was wounded.
The passing car was a black Malibu seen in surveillance video departing one of Bethany’s stash houses that night, Bethany testified.
He could be seen in one of the videos, collecting weapons from the men in the car — Phillips, Todd Anthony Hill, Terrell Chase and John Chatmon — when it pulled up at the other house.
“They just said they shot up Earl’s house,” Bethany said as jurors watched the men arrive, a reference to Earl Whitley, the father of Little Earl who is now in prison on a crack cocaine trafficking conviction.
“I asked them, ‘Why’d you do that?’” Bethany said. He said Phillips told him he “was tired of (people associated with Earl Whitley) doing stuff and going to hide.”
Bethany said he chided the men.
“Shooting up houses. I don’t do that,” he told the jury. “I told them their houses would be shot up, too.”
When prosecutor James Phillips asked Bethany what the defendant’s response was, he said Quentin Phillips told him: “I don’t give a (expletive.)”
“They follow him,” Bethany said, explaining the relationship between Quentin Phillips and the others. “He’s the ringleader of that little group. They looked up to him.”
Later, the jury heard the frantic cries of Little Earl’s mother on police body camera video, “Oh God, that’s my baby, my baby, Oh Lord, my baby!”
She had been shot in her lower leg, police later found out, but in the heat of the moment, she paced around the house as first responders tried to save the boy’s life. At one point, taken outside, she threw a brick through a window in an attempt to get to her son, an officer testified.
Crime scene photos showed the front of the home and the vehicles parked outside riddled with bullets — three calibers of weapons that included an AR-15 rifle, prosecutors said — and a bloody scene in the child’s room.
Quentin Phillips, no relation to the prosecutor, is one of five men who eventually were charged with murder in Little Earl’s death, and the first to be tried. The others were Chase, now 31; Hill, now 36; Chatmon, now 41; and Michael Davonte Woodard, now 29.
This year Hill and Woodard agreed to plea bargains that sent them to prison on lesser charges. Chase and Chatmon are in the Bexar County jail awaiting trial.
Chatmon had been identified as a suspect in the drive-by when he was arrested on a federal firearms charge the same summer. So were Tramone Mykel Anderson, then 25, and Dakota Jamaine Peppers, 32, who were picked up in the same federal sweep targeting gun violence on the East Side, though neither was charged with murder.
The case against Quentin Phillips is being heard in the 437th District Court, Judge Joel Perez presiding.
Bethany, a convicted felon, pleaded guilty in federal court to drug and weapons charges and said Thursday he hoped his willingness to testify might lead to leniency.
When asked how he found out about Little Earl’s death, Bethany said a friend called him and told him, “Earl’s son had passed away.” He said he told the friend, “somebody has to be accountable for that.”