As a junior, he had led the Simeon Wolverines basketball team to the Illinois Class AA state championship, and over the summer he was given the honor of being ranked as the best high school player in the entire nation.
As the Simeon student body began preparing for lunch period on November 20, Wilson elected to try and talk to Rush again instead of eating with his teammates as he usually did.
Murphy met up with the two boys shortly thereafter, and Moore and Dixon followed her to a luncheonette on South Vincennes Avenue.
Shortly after Murphy entered the luncheonette, Wilson inadvertently bumped into Moore since he had not been paying attention to where he was going, instead trying to talk to his estranged girlfriend.
It took paramedics forty minutes to arrive at the scene, and to further complicate matters Chicago emergency protocol in place forced the ambulance to take Wilson to the closest available hospital.
His condition progressively worsened during the hours that followed, which led his mother, Mary, to have her son taken off of life support.
[9][10] After word reached Simeon of the shooting, all of the members of the basketball team were called out of their classes and brought into the teachers' lounge where they were kept for the rest of that day.
Once they were informed that Wilson had died, his teammates were asked whether or not they wanted to go forward with their season opener, which was scheduled for later on against the team they defeated to win the state championship in 1984, Evanston Township; they won the game.
The two boys were brought into interrogation rooms and questioned by detectives for most of the night, eventually signing statements of confession.
Both of these statements were later recanted, but the boys were still charged with murder after questioning and the state of Illinois elected to try them both as adults due to the serious nature of their actions.
State Attorneys Kenneth Malatesta and Arthur Hill presided over the prosecution and presented the police's theory, which was in the confessions that were recanted.
Dixon's attorney, Brian Dosch, called his client's confession "garbage" and destroyed a copy of it in front of reporters.
He also expressed that he felt both of the defendants were being "railroaded" by overzealous law enforcement officials whose desperation to hold someone accountable for the murder of a star athlete compromised their integrity and led them to create false case theory.
Jetun Rush graduated from Simeon and Central State University as a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
[14] Brandon Sherrod Wilson, Jetun and Ben's son, became a star player at Riverside Church and St. Francis Prep,[15] and Long Island Lutheran High School and was recruited by the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where he played one season.
He was killed in a single-car crash on the Northern State Parkway near East Hempstead, New York in January 2022, after losing control of his vehicle.