A Merrillville woman was charged Thursday with killing her brother. A witness said it was an “accident” on her birthday.
Myriah “Yaya” Stokes, 20, is charged with reckless homicide and criminal recklessness.
She hasn’t been apprehended and is ordered held on a $3,500 cash bond.
Hammond Police responded at 4 a.m. March 2 to the 1900 block of Warwick Avenue for a shooting.
Inside an apartment, they found Monica Torres, 21-year-old Charles “C.J.” Stokes’ mother, screaming, crying and “incoherent” and covered with her son’s blood; she hugged his body on the kitchen floor. After she declined to leave, police pulled her away from him.
She refused to say who shot him and kept coming back to the crime scene. Eventually, they put her in the back of a squad car, records show. At the police station, she didn’t answer questions and asked for a lawyer.
“Oh my god, bro, my brother, my brother,” a witness heard just afterward.
Charles’ friend said he went to Stardust Bowl in Merrillville on March 1 with a group including Charles. Later that night, the pair went to El Sombrero bar in East Chicago. Torres and Myriah Stokes picked them up and went back to the mother’s apartment.
Charles and Myriah got into an argument. When he “smacked” her in the face, she got a gun off the dining room table, firing a shot that hit the friend in the shoulder.
When Torres and Myriah struggled over the gun, it went off again. Charles “fell down.”
Myriah — who was described as “hurt,” “confused,” and “scared” — left.
A witness said Myriah had shot at her brother months earlier and sometimes got in physical fights.
She declined to speak with investigators.
