Blood feud, chance encounter at Portland strip club sends man to prison for 6 years in killing (2024)

Thomas Earl Cooper Jr. charged out of the Grind strip club in Southeast Portland on July 25, 2020, and opened fire at a longtime rival who stood in the club’s doorway, then sent more shots toward a stranger holding a shiny object in the parking lot.

The glint in Tyrell Penney’s hand was nothing but a cellphone — he was on a video call to the mother of his two girls back in Sacramento — but the two shots that hit him in the spine and leg killed him.

Cooper, now 36, claimed self-defense in the killing, but a jury found him guilty last week of second-degree manslaughter and Multnomah County Circuit Judge Christopher Marshall sentenced him Monday to six years and three months in prison.

It was Cooper’s second trial in Penney’s killing.

A jury in 2022 acquitted Cooper on charges of attempted murder for wounding Mascio Walker, Penney’s cousin, at the strip club but declared a mistrial on a second-degree murder charge relating to Penney’s death.

In a statement read by a prosecutor, Penney’s now-12-year-old daughter said she remains traumatized by the sound of her mother’s screams that day.

“You not only took my father, you took my best friend,” she told Cooper on Monday.

Penney, 27, had no connection to Cooper. Penney was in town to visit Walker, who was paralyzed from the waist down as he was shot in the doorway of the club.

Defense attorney Carl Macpherson said Cooper had a reasonable fear that Walker and his associates were responsible for a string of unsolved drive-bys at Cooper’s family home and had directed an unidentified assassin who shot Cooper seven times at point-blank range at Le Bistro Montage in 2018.

Walker was in custody at the time of the drive-by shootings. A detective called by the defense said police considered the theory that Walker was involved in the Montage attack, however.

At sentencing, local pastor Elmer Yarborough said he rushed to the hospital after the Bistro shooting and prayed for Cooper’s survival, not knowing that Cooper would shoot and kill his own nephew, Penney, two years later.

“But if you were shot again, guess where I’ll be — right by your bedside, praying that you’ll be OK,” Yarborough said. “Nobody deserves what you got, and nobody deserves what my nephew got.”

The feud between Cooper and Walker had begun in May 2017 in Beaverton when Ramon Harris was fatally shot at Xpose Club and Cooper stepped over his body while leaving, which Walker interpreted as a sign of disrespect, Macpherson said in court.

Cooper testified he was at the Grind when he spotted two of Walker’s friends inside and bolted out the front door, then shot Walker and Penney.

“He was terrified, he was trapped, and he was trying to escape an extremely dangerous situation,” Macpherson said.

Prosecutors noted that Cooper could have left the club from a different door but instead pulled out an unlicensed concealed handgun with an extended magazine and shot the first two men he saw upon leaving.

Cooper was one of four men charged with second-degree murder in connection to the fatal shooting of Terrance King at a nightclub in Lakewood, Washington in 2019, but the charges were dropped. Cooper later bragged about the shooting in a song released under the rapper name “BooBang 24/7.”

On Monday, the judge sentenced Cooper to the mandatory minimum term under Measure 11, with credit for time served.

Prosecutors said they had hoped to secure a second-degree murder conviction based on surveillance footage that captured Penney’s killing, but the jury opted for the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Kirsten Snowden said the case was hampered by court rulings that have restricted evidence of gang connections.

“We had hoped the video would speak for itself, but it is difficult to prosecute a gang-motivated murder case when the appellate courts say that evidence is too prejudicial and inadmissible,” Snowden said.

—Zane Sparling covers breaking news and courts for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at 503-319-7083, [email protected] or @pdxzane.

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