On a spring morning in 2002, a woman named Tynisha looked out her window to see a naked man sprinting down the street, his body streaked with blood. She had no idea who he was. She just knew something terrible had happened, and she called the police. Minutes later, officers arrived at the apartment of Tynisha Sias.
She was 21 years old, a mother of two, a woman with a smile her friends had nicknamed “Pocahontas” because she never let her troubles show. When the police walked through her door, they found her body on the floor. She had been stabbed, her jaw broken, her neck broken, her eye socket fractured. One of her lungs had been torn from her body and partially eaten.
The man the police found running down the street was Antron Singleton Sr. , a 25-year-old rapper known as Big Lurch. He was covered in her blood, but he wasn’t running like a man fleeing a crime. He was barking at the sky, staring straight up, pulling at his own hair.
When they tried to handcuff him, he thrashed and growled like an animal. Big Lurch had spent years chasing fame. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, he’d grown up fascinated by horror films and the macabre, writing lyrics as violent as the slasher movies he loved. As a teenager in East Dallas, he’d kept those songs to himself, but eventually he found friends who encouraged him.
At 15 he started rapping under the name G Spade, then changed it to Big Lurch after the towering butler from *The Addams Family*, because at six and a half feet tall, the name fit. Texas never felt like the place to break through, so he moved to California in the late 1990s, right in the middle of the West Coast rap boom. He formed a group called Cosmic Slop Shop with two other artists, released one album in 1998, and when the group disbanded the next year, he threw himself into a solo career. He was sure superstardom was just out of reach.
“I started off underground,” he once said. “Rapping over other people’s beats, doing shows in ’91, ’92 in Dallas. I came to California. Mac Mall hooked me up with Mike Mosley.
Mike Mosley was doing Tupac at the time and E-40. ”
He signed with Stress Free Records, a label owned by a well-known attorney named Milton Grimes. Grimes was a famous lawyer in his own right, a man who had represented Rodney King and later two dismissed jurors from the O. J.
Simpson trial. Big Lurch claimed he also had a professional relationship with Death Row Records and its CEO, Suge Knight. For a while, everything was moving in the right direction. Then on his 24th birthday, a drunk driver rear-ended him.
He broke his neck. The hospital gave him painkillers, but when he was discharged, the pain was so severe he could barely walk. He needed something stronger, something that would numb him completely, so he went back to an old habit. “I started smoking PCP,” he said later.
“I smoked it two or three times when I was younger and got that numbing feeling. I was using it as anesthesia. ”
The PCP did more than dull the pain. It sent him into hallucinations.
And when the high wore off, he was left disoriented, overstimulated, and desperate for more. That same year, he’d gotten close to a couple in Southeast LA, a man named Thomas Moore and his girlfriend Tynisha Sias. Thomas was part of the local music scene. Tynisha wanted to become a model.
Her friends said she could always smile, no matter what was happening in her life. She had two children, a pit bull, and a plan to leave Thomas because their relationship had become violent. Her mother, Carolyn, said Tynisha had her bags packed, ready to go. The night before she died, Thomas and Big Lurch smoked PCP together.
By the next morning, Lurch’s high had worn off, the chronic pain was back, and he drove over to Thomas and Tynisha’s apartment looking for more. Tynisha was alone. Thomas was out. Her kids were in school.
Her dog was locked in the bedroom. What happened inside that apartment has never been fully explained. The official story is that he grabbed a knife from the counter, stabbed her, tore out one of her lungs, and took a bite out of it. But the details never sat right with everyone.
A friend of Tynisha’s named Alyssa Allen lived nearby and saw the naked man running down the street. She called police, and when they arrived at Tynisha’s apartment and found her body, she screamed. Officers later found Big Lurch wandering the street, covered in Tynisha’s blood, one of her organs in his possession in some accounts. He was comatose for two weeks after his arrest, a side effect of a massive PCP overdose.
When he woke up, he had no memory of what had happened. That didn’t stop the medical examiner from finding flesh and blood in his stomach, blood that wasn’t his own. Detectives matched bite marks on Tynisha’s body to his teeth. At the trial, prosecutors argued he wasn’t too drunk or too high to know what he was doing.
Witnesses said he had asked several people to leave the apartment earlier, and that he’d waited until he was alone with Tynisha before striking. He tried to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the law in California was clear: a person cannot use voluntary drug use as an excuse for their mental state at the time of a crime. His own lawyer, Milton Grimes, argued that PCP had sent Lurch back to a primal state. “You can do the acts of a beast because you don’t have the conscience of a human being,” Grimes told the jury.
But the jury didn’t buy it. After just one hour of deliberation, they found Big Lurch guilty of aggravated mayhem, first-degree murder, and torture. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, without the possibility of parole. After the verdict, things got strange.
Tynisha’s mother, Carolyn, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Stress Free Records and Death Row Records. She believed Big Lurch’s claim that the record companies had given him drugs to make him more marketable as a violent gangster rapper. She argued that the label had encouraged his drug use and his violent behavior because violence sold records. Suge Knight, the head of Death Row, denied ever meeting Lurch.
“I don’t know this guy. Nobody from our company knows this guy. They’re just looking to get paid. Not only is this slanderous, I think it is criminal to lie to shake somebody down for money.
”
The lawsuit was dropped, but Carolyn never stopped speaking out. In a documentary years later, she made her belief clear: the real killer was Thomas Moore, Tynisha’s boyfriend. “He was beating on her,” Carolyn said. “She had all her stuff packed, ready to leave the day all this happened.
She got hit in the back of the neck with one of the little kid scooters because a hand print was on the scooter, a bloody hand print. But they said they didn’t know who that was. But it wasn’t his. ”
She pointed out that Tynisha had an impossibly high amount of PCP in her system, far more than could be ingested by smoking.
“It was like somebody pulled the bottle down her throat,” she said. “Because she had so much in her system, they said ain’t no way she could have smoked that much. ”
She also noted that the house was full of guns and drugs, but everything illegal had been cleaned out the day of the murder, long before police arrived. “There was evidence there, footprints, fingerprints on doors, bloody fingerprints.
Shoe at the back door. Where’d all this evidence go? They said DNA came up lost. ”
There were also details that never made it into court.
A bloody handprint on a scooter didn’t match Lurch’s hand. DNA at the scene matched neither Lurch nor Tynisha. Tynisha had been hit in the back of the head with that scooter, according to her mother. None of that evidence was ever mentioned in the courtroom.
Even stranger was Big Lurch’s claim that his own lawyer, Milton Grimes, told him to admit to what happened and plead insanity, a strategy that would supposedly get him the least amount of prison time. Grimes never mentioned that Lurch had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder years before the murder, something that could have supported a mental health defense. Lurch claimed Grimes had even picked him up from a mental institution twice before. Under the California Penal Code, a defendant could not invoke the insanity defense if their mental state was brought on by voluntary drug use.
The defense was almost certainly doomed from the start, and Grimes, a veteran attorney who had handled high-profile cases for years, had to know that. Years later, Milton Grimes ran into legal trouble of his own. In April 2025, he was arrested and tried for two decades of tax evasion. He’d hidden his income from the IRS using cashier’s checks and funds from his clients’ trust accounts.
He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $7 million in back taxes. Big Lurch’s own record label, Black Market Records, released his first and only solo album while he was in prison. He’d wanted to call it *The Puppet Master*, but they published it as *It’s All Bad* against his wishes. They photoshopped a picture of him holding a silver platter with a skull on it.
One of the songs, “I Did It to You,” was played in the courtroom for the jury. The prosecution called it a blueprint for the murder. “They brought up that song like it was a blueprint for the murder,” Big Lurch said. “And the jury went for it.
”
Lurch’s son, Antron Singleton Jr. , was a young child when his father was arrested. He grew up visiting his father in prison and stayed deeply connected to him. Today, he runs a label called 3XL Entertainment and works to keep his father’s music alive.
He’s one of his father’s most vocal supporters and believes Big Lurch was framed. “Big Lurch was framed,” Antron Jr. has said, “and Tynisha’s boyfriend plotted to kill her and got away with it. ”
In 2024, a petition was created to spread awareness about freeing Big Lurch.
A year later, his son launched a GoFundMe to preserve his father’s legacy. But Antron Singleton Sr. remains in prison, not eligible for parole, with no sign of a retrial. His case still raises questions that were never answered in court.
Who left that bloody handprint on the scooter? Whose DNA was found at the scene? How did Tynisha get so much PCP in her system if she never smoked it herself? Why was all the evidence of drugs and guns removed from the house before police arrived?
None of it was ever explained. Tynisha Sias was a young mother with a smile her friends remembered fondly. She had a plan to leave a violent relationship and start over. What happened to her in that apartment still haunts everyone who looks at the case.
Tynisha’s mother, Carolyn, has spent years insisting that her daughter’s real killer got away with it. She never stopped believing that.
