The Roanoke Times

File May Edward Beverly had told investigators that his victim, Yancy Tyler, attacked him first.

Edward Deshawn Beverly's defense described him as a victim, fleeing a home life where he was neglected and molested to be raised first by the streets, then by the juvenile justice system.

Roanoke prosecutors described him as a dangerous career criminal, with a pattern of committing violent crimes that started in his childhood and culminated in the April 2006 murder of Yancy Tyler.

As he stood up to receive his sentence Thursday in Roanoke Circuit Court, Beverly turned to Tyler's cousins and told them, "I'm sorry for the situation that happened that night." Then he told the judge, "I truly don't feel like I'm a lost cause."

When Judge Jonathan Apgar asked him if he was ready to be sentenced, Beverly replied, "I'm never ready for this."

Then the judge sentenced Tyler to spend 30 years in prison.

The 31-year-old is already serving additional prison time. In 1996 he was ordered to serve eight years of a 20-year sentence for robbery and malicious wounding. After Beverly was arrested for Tyler's murder, a judge ordered him to serve four more years on those convictions.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, Assistant Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Chrystal Smith agreed to ask for a punishment of no more than 38 years.

"I'm going to ask that you make this conviction the end of Mr. Beverly's criminal history," she told the judge.

After the hearing, Tyler's cousin, Maryland resident Sharon Barbour, said she was satisfied with Beverly's punishment. She pledged to pray that Beverly would seek spiritual help.

"He has not accepted the responsibility for what he did," she said.

Beverly's aunt, Rosa Hardy of Northwest Roanoke, called Apgar's decision unfair. She remains skeptical of the account of events given by Lisa Walker, the prosecution's key witness.

"Something just doesn't seem right about it," Hardy said.

When Beverly pleaded no contest to second-degree murder in June, the prosecution and defense presented two starkly different versions of Tyler's death.

The stabbing happened at Walker's house in the 1000 block of 35th Street Northwest. Walker has testified that on April 18, 2006, Beverly called her asking to retrieve a puppy that belonged to him that was still at her house. She had recently ended a relationship with Beverly and had resumed seeing Tyler, whom she had dated before.

She picked up Beverly and asked him to wait outside, but instead he went upstairs to her bedroom, where he confronted Tyler and threatened him with a knife. Tyler hid in a bathroom and Beverly started to leave but then turned back and went after Tyler. He forced the bathroom door open and stabbed the 45-year-old twice, once in the heart, prosecutors say.

At Beverly's sentencing, Walker told the judge she saw the fear in Tyler's eyes as he died.

"Mr. Beverly did not have to do what he did. He could have just walked away."

She asked Apgar to give Beverly the maximum sentence of 40 years.

For his part, Beverly claims that Walker invited him to her house, and when he arrived he was surprised to find Tyler there. He maintains that Tyler attacked him first, that he wrestled the knife away from the older man and stabbed only after Tyler had wrapped a cord around his neck and was trying to strangle him.

In his closing argument, defense attorney Lance Hale emphasized a cellphone and book in Walker's bedroom that appeared to have blood spatter on them, asserting that had police tested those objects they would have matched Beverly's blood, thus supporting his version of events.

"He did not intend for Yancy Tyler to die," Hale said.

Beverly fled the house after the stabbing. The next day, he contacted The Roanoke Times and said he would turn himself in after the newspaper printed his version of what happened.

He did not turn himself in but was instead captured April 20, 2006, in Southeast Roanoke.