A Philadelphia man who allegedly shot his brother in a leg and pistol-whipped him at a party in Chester in 2024 has been held for court on most charges.
Magisterial District Judge Wilden H. Davis dismissed the most serious charge of attempted murder after testimony from two family members who said they could not recall what happened that night, but held Takeem Harrison on charges of aggravated assault and firearms offenses.
The shooting occurred in the early morning hours of Dec. 1 on the 100 block of 22nd Street.
Assistant District Attorney Dareus Chen called the victim, Tony Cobbs-Harrison, but he could not remember who shot him or even whether Takeem was there that night.
Chen played a recorded statement Cobbs-Harrison had previously provided to police in which he did identify Takeem Harrison as the shooter.
“Who shot you?” he is asked in that recording.
“My brother,” Cobbs-Harrison replied.
“Ok, your brother being Takeem?” the investigator asks.
“Yeah,” Cobbs-Harrison replies.
He said in the recording that he was tussling with his brother and had been pistol-whipped.
“I can’t believe he f***ing shot me,” Cobbs-Harrison said in the recording. “I said, ‘Please don’t kill me, man. You know I got children, please don’t kill me, man.’ ”
The judge allowed that recording to come into evidence over the objections of defense counsel Paige Benedetto, but not one from the defendant and victim’s mother, Mya Payne.
Payne had given the name Harrison when she gave her recorded statement to police in 2024, and provided the same birth date in court as the woman in that recording, but Benedetto successfully argued the recording could not be authenticated.
In that recording, the woman says that her two sons, Tony and Takeem, do not get along. She was having a party that night and at some point there was an argument between the two.
She said she tried to get Takeem to get into a car with her so she could drive him home, but he instead grabbed a gun from outside and went back inside for his brother.
“I followed and I said, ‘Takeem, don’t do that, don’t do that,’ and he just shot him: Pow! Pow!” she said in the recording.
The woman said she ran next door to call the police so she did not see him leave.
“He stood over Tony with the gun,” she said. “Once Tony got hit, he hit the floor and he said, ‘Come on, bro, don’t shoot me no more.’ …He was standing over him with the f***ing gun telling him he was going to kill him and hit him with the f***ing gun.”
Payne said several times in court that the recording was a lie.
“I don’t remember that statement at all,” she told Benedetto.
Payne added that she and everyone else at the party that night were “tore up” and she does not recall the incident.
Benedetto asked that the entirety of the case be thrown out because the commonwealth was unable to make out any elements of any charges. For the attempted murder charge, she argued that Cobbs-Harrison was shot in s leg, not a vital part of the body that could be inferred as an intent to kill.
Chen noted the thigh where the victim was struck does contain the femoral artery, however, and that severing that can cause someone to bleed out in minutes, if not seconds.
Even putting aside the mother’s account, Chen argued Cobbs-Harrison had said in his statement that his brother shot him and pistol-whipped him, which should be enough to hold the charges at this stage of prosecution. A preliminary hearing has a far lower bar of “more likely than not” with all inferences going to the commonwealth.
Benedetto had also asked for a bail reduction, since the alleged victim did not seem to have any fear of her client being back on the streets.
Chen countered that the case took so long to get to court because Harrison had fled to North Carolina, where he racked up more violent crime and drug trafficking charges.
Online court records indicate he was arrested in Wake County, North Carolina, on robbery and drug charges in July 2025.
The judge decided bail would remain the same at $500,000 cash and set formal arraignment for Aug. 12 at the County Courthouse in Media.