Deputy District Attorney Ryan Kiray wheeled the life-sized skeleton to the front of the third-floor courtroom and pointed to the sticky notes marking where the bullets went into Makeida Thompson’s head.
Terrence Washington, on trial for killing Ms. Thompson in his mother’s living room in November 2020, told jurors minutes earlier that he had feared the mother of his child was reaching for the gun he knew she kept holstered on her right side. He feared, he said, that she was going to kill him.
“You decided then [to empty] a magazine in the back of her head,” Mr. Kiray said.
Washington fired all seven rounds in his handgun. Four of them hit Ms. Thompson near the back left portion of her head. A pathologist testified earlier Thursday that she would have been immediately incapacitated.
“At any point did she stop reaching?” Mr. Kiray asked.
He pointed to a sticky note. Did she stop reaching, he asked, when a bullet traveled through her brain and lodged near the front of her head?
What about when this one, he pointed, when one went through the back left of her head and out the top — did she stop reaching then.
Washington interjected throughout: He shot as fast as he could, he said. It was a matter of seconds. Single-digit seconds.
“This woman you called a good mother” — Washington interrupted with “great mother,” but Mr. Kiray continued: “You thought she was going to kill you in front of your son … that she was going to kill your son — that’s what you’re going with, sir?”
Washington took the stand in his own defense Thursday to close out testimony in the homicide trial against him. Mr. Kiray and defense attorney Thomas N. Farrell will make their closing arguments Friday morning.
Washington told jurors that he had invited Ms. Thompson to his mother’s house that morning so they could “sit down like adults” and he could “talk her off the child-support ledge.” They had been on-again/off-again for years and, at the time, he explained, they were engaged in “petty” arguments over child support and custody of their child, who was 1 at the time. He didn’t want the courts digging around in his finances, and besides, he said — he already “paid for everything.”
Ms. Thompson hadn’t been at the house very long — just long enough to greet Washington’s mother, who was working in the kitchen, and his grandmother, who sat on a swivel chair in the living room with the baby. Washington said he positioned himself by the stairs behind the couch, as there was a gun in a bag there and he wanted to keep the child away from it.
He couldn’t legally own a gun but he carried one in his front waistband. As a barber with vending machines, he often carried around large sums on money, and he wanted the protection, he said. But that morning, the gun was in a bag on the steps, not in his waistband.
Washington said he was counting out bills when he looked up and saw Ms. Thompson turn toward him from her seat on the couch. He testified that she looked at him, looked at his waistband, mouthed the words “[expletive] it,” and leaned toward her left as if to maneuver her right hand toward the gun holstered to her own waistband.
Washington told jurors he knew Ms. Thompson always carried a gun. She was a juvenile probation officer.
“I just started shooting,” he said as Mr. Farrell asked him gently what happened that day. “I thought she was going to kill me.”
He opened fire, he said, to stop her from shooting him, or from shooting the baby or his grandmother.
“I never wanted this, ever,” he said through tears.
From the courtroom gallery, one of Ms. Thompson’s loved ones stood up.
“Those tears is fake,” she said, repeating it as she walked out of the courtroom.
Washington said he ran from the house, intending to call his attorney and turn himself in. He stopped at a cousin’s home and saw the news, which he claimed made the shooting out to be an execution. He said he couldn’t turn himself in to Pittsburgh police — “[they] would kill me.”
So he fled to Seattle where, he testified, he also intended to turn himself in. He was picked up by police there before he could do so.
Washington said Ms. Thompson had threatened him before, writing in one text message that she would end his life. He said he wasn’t worried about child support because he already paid everything, and he wasn’t worried about custody because Ms. Thompson told him he could see the baby anytime he wanted.
But Mr. Kiray said the threatening message was sent months earlier and was in response to messages Washington had sent telling Ms. Thompson she had “three strikes” after he told her to stop bringing up the courts and child support.
In one message days before the shooting, Washington wrote: “The not seeing my son is the most [expletive].” That sounded like Washington was concerned about custody, Mr. Kiray said. In another, he wrote: “All this to get nothing a month.” That one, the deputy district attorney said, sounded like he was angry about child support.
Earlier Thursday, investigators and experts testified that all of the shell casings found at the East Liberty home after the shooting were fired by Washington’s gun; none came from Ms. Thompson’s weapon, which, as a semi-automatic, would have ejected spent cartridges after each shot.
First Published: March 20, 2025, 9:07 p.m.
Updated: March 21, 2025, 11:01 a.m.
