John Jefferson
Rashad Maleek Trice (WDIV/St. Clair Shores Police Department). Wynter Cole-Smith (Macomb County Prosecutor)
Bound in handcuffs, Rashad Meleek Trice told police last year that he would probably spent the rest of his life in prison, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen to him. A Michigan judge sentenced him on Friday to a mandatory life sentence for kidnapping and murdering his ex-girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter, Wynter Cole-Smith, according to The Lansing State Journal.
“You, Rashad M. Trice, truly deserve the death penalty for maliciously taking the life of Wynter Ava’Mae Cole Smith,” the child’s maternal grandmother, Willeen Cannon, said in a statement read to the court by an assistant attorney general, according to NBC Detroit affiliate WDIV. “You say you are a monster, but a monster is just who it is and don’t hide from the sinister things you do and create. You are an evil coward and you live like a wild animal. So you should feel right at home for the rest of your life. You deserve where you are and where you are going. Wynter did not deserve what you did to her, nor did to her mother, you should never be able to be around decent human beings after what you’ve done. Rot in hell.”
Trice sparked an Amber Alert in the city of Lansing in early July 2023. He had stabbed his ex-girlfriend, who is Wynter’s mother, then he abducted the 2-year-old by driving off in the woman’s 2013 Chevrolet Impala.
At about 4:50 a.m. on July 3, 2023, a police officer in St. Clair Shores, a suburb of Detroit which is about 90 miles east of Lansing, spotted the Impala and tried to conduct a traffic stop. Trice took off, but crashed into another police car after a short chase, the affidavit said. While investigators found “a significant amount of blood was present in the vehicle consistent with Trice’s stab wounds” along with portions of a pink charging cord, there was no sign of Wynter, setting off a frantic search, the affidavit said.
Trice denied taking Wynter and said he last saw her with her mother. FBI agents used cell sites to track Trice’s whereabouts after the kidnapping. Just before 7 p.m. on July 5, 2023, officers found Wynter’s body in an alley in Detroit between Olympia Street and Edgewood Avenue near Erwin Avenue, not far from Coleman A. Young International Airport.
“[Wynter’s] cause of death appeared to be strangulation with a pink cell phone charging cord, that was recovered with the body,” the affidavit said. “The pink cell phone charging cord was consistent with the pink cord parts recovered from the Chevrolet Impala.”
Cannon called her granddaughter a “brilliant, bright and very affectionate toddler.”
“She was so full of love,” she said.
Trice ended up pleading guilty to charges in both state and federal court. The judge on Friday also gave him 60 to 90 years for first-degree criminal sexual conduct for sexually assaulting Wynter’s mother. Trice reportedly declined to make a statement to the court at his state hearing. Records show sentencing in his federal case is scheduled for this upcoming Friday. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison there; federal prosecutors declined to seek the death penalty.
David Harris contributed to this report.
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