Top girls hoops prospect shot dead in NYC housing project

According to the New York Daily News, New York Post, ESPN New York and a variety of other sources, 18-year-old Tayshana Murphy (who was nicknamed Chicken), was shot and killed in Harlem's Grant housing project around 4:00 a.m. on Sunday morning . The Daily News reported that friends and at least one witnesses told officials that she was attempting to out run a gunman in a hallway of her building when she was killed.

Murphy, a 5-foot-6 senior at New York (N.Y.) Murry Bergtraum High , was considered one of the top guard prospects in the nation and had received recruiting interest from a variety of collegiate programs. The teen planned to use her basketball talents to improve her future and help her family leave the projects which eventually claimed her life.

Yet the circumstances around her shooting are so tragic and troubling that they may threaten to overshadow many of the accomplishments of her bright life. According to the Daily News, Murphy was wearing a hooded sweatshirt at a party with friends from her project when she was chased by the gunman in question. According to some who were at the party, Murphy was mistaken for a boy who was wearing the same sweatshirt by her assailant, and protested her innocence to the moment she was shot dead in the building hallway .

"She was pleading for her life," Teka Taylor, one of Murphy's close friends, told the Daily News. "She was saying, 'No, please, I don't have nothing to do with it.'"