Leader of Baltimore’s Eight Tray Gangster Crips crew sentenced to 37 years in federal prison
The leader of a violent faction of the Crips gang in Baltimore, who himself admitted killing three people, has been sentenced to 37 years in federal prison.
At sentencing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett added five years of supervised release for Trayvon Hall, 31, who pleaded guilty in August to leading a drug and racketeering conspiracy that federal prosecutors say terrorized Southwest Baltimore.
Hall, also known as “Tru,” led the Baccwest Eight Tray Gangster Crips.
Under Hall’s reign, the gang lorded over the city’s Hilton, Lexington Terrace and Franklin Sinclair neighborhoods from at least 2016 to 2019, dealing drugs, robbing people and shooting rival gang members.
His crew was known to brag on social media about money and violence, while using some of the same platforms to proclaim control over drug territories.
The Eight Tray Gangster Crips are a subset of the infamous, national Crips gang, and traces its origins to the 1970s in California, according to the Department of Justice. The Crips set reached Maryland around 2000, trickling onto the streets of Baltimore and infiltrating the state’s correctional facilities. To this day, the gang is said to recruit new members from jails and prisons, federal prosecutors say.
In 2019, a Jessup correctional officer who moonlighted as a high-ranking gang member was sentenced to 20 years in state prison for, among other crimes, smuggling drugs and weapons into the prison.
Hall in 2013 traveled to California to win the West Coast leadership’s blessing to start an official faction in Maryland, according to court documents. When he returned, he sent his lieutenants onto the streets to establish territory in Southwest Baltimore and began targeting other gangs to maintain their control.
The gang leader’s plea agreement details a particularly violent rivalry with the Black Guerilla Family gang in Baltimore. Hall’s rivals operated a competing drug outpost in Lexington Terrace.
Bennett sentenced another member of Hall’s set of Eight Tray Gangster Crips gang, 34-year-old Marcus Williams, to about seven years in prison on the same charges as Hall.
Both pleaded guilty to opening fire on a group of Black Guerilla Family members but instead striking a pair of bystanders.
Hall shot and killed a rival, Albert Pittman, in July 2016. On Nov. 11 that year, Hall gunned down a group of Black Guerilla Family members, injuring two and killing Shyheim Brown.
Federal prosecutors say he boasted about the latter killing in a series of text messages afterward. The government attributed one more killing to Hall.
On July 6, 2018, Hall opened fire on members of a rival drug crew who were playing dice on Abington Avenue. The shooting left Steven McKnight dead and another person wounded.
