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Rashad Trice, 26, allegedly kidnapped Wynter Cole-Smith, 2, from her mother’s home in Lansing, Michigan, killed her, and abandoned her body in an alley. (Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office/Lansing Police Department. Images of Trice and Wynter released during the search for them.)
Federal prosecutors declined on Thursday to seek the death penalty against the man who allegedly kidnapped his ex’s daughter and strangled the child to death with a pink cellphone charging cord. And since the state of Michigan lacks the death penalty, Rashad Maleek Trice, 26, won’t face any possibility of capital punishment in his local and federal cases.
Prosecutors said that he attacked his ex-girlfriend, stabbing and sexually assaulting her in the city of Lansing late July 2. She managed to stab him in self-defense and flee, authorities said. Her daughter, Wynter Cole-Smith, 2, and the 1-year-old boy the ex shared with Trice remained in the apartment.
Authorities said that Trice kidnapped Wynter and stole a Chevrolet Impala. On the early morning of July 3, 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.
In body camera footage from the arrest, Trice denied taking Wynter and said he last saw her with her mother.
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“I’ll probably do the rest of my life in prison,” he told a police officer while handcuffed.
The officer briefly raised his own hands into the air and replied: “I can’t say so.”
But the accused man was adamant: “I can tell you now.”
FBI agents said they used cell sites to track Trice’s whereabouts after the kidnapping. Just before 7 p.m. on July 5, officers found Wynter’s body in an alley 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.”
Trice told FBI agents in an interview on July 4 that he and his ex got into an argument over money which became violent, according to the affidavit. During the interrogation, Trice allegedly said “I am already a monster.”
