PHILLY MAN GETS PRISON FOR KILLING ALLEGED DRUG DEALER

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A man who had been portrayed by some as a neighborhood
hero for killing an alleged drug dealer was sentenced yesterday to 10 to 30
years in prison.

Brian M. Tyson, 42, who had an otherwise clean record, was convicted in
December of third-degree murder in the 1997 shooting of Damon Millner, 23.

Prosecutors said Tyson shot into a group of four people who were sitting on
a stoop a block from his house in the city's Feltonville section. Tyson,
who frequently had called police to complain about drug dealing in the
neighborhood, claimed the shooting was self-defense.

"Damon Millner was a drug gangster!" Tyson shouted in court yesterday.

Tyson maintained that he heard what sounded like gunfire as he worked on
his car that night and felt a bump on his back.

Although Millner had a gun in his waistband, prosecutors said there was no
evidence that it had been fired or that Tyson had acted in self-defense. An
autopsy revealed Millner had 12 plastic bags of cocaine up his rectum.

Prosecutors had sought a 20-to 40-year sentence.

"He went out there and opened fire on a group of people sitting on a step,
who were doing nothing to him," prosecutor Judith Frankel Rubino said.

A former neighbor, Christine Saunders, told The Philadelphia Inquirer after
the shooting that Tyson was "a very sweet, polite guy who was the only one
in the whole neighborhood who would stand up to those hoodlums."

Saunders said she and her husband had complained to police about drug
problems and left the neighborhood with their three children after shots
were fired through their window.