Man receives life sentence for murder of two-year-old girl
Rashad Maleek Trice (WDIV/St. Clair Shores Police Department). Wynter Cole-Smith (Macomb County District Attorney)
Handcuffed, Rashad Meleek Trice told police last year that he would likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and that’s exactly what will happen to him now. A Michigan judge sentenced him Friday to a mandatory life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of his ex-girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter, Wynter Cole-Smith, the Lansing State Journal reports.
“You, Rashad M. Trice, truly deserve the death penalty for the malicious killing of Wynter Ava’Mae Cole Smith,” Willeen Cannon, the child’s maternal grandmother, said in a statement read to the court by an assistant attorney general, according to Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV. “You say you are a monster, but a monster is who you are and you don’t hide from the dark things you do and create. You are an evil coward and you live like a wild animal. So you should feel 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 she deserve what you did to her mother. After what you did, you should never be able to be around decent people again. Rot in hell.”
Trice triggered an Amber Alert in the city of Lansing in early July 2023. He had stabbed his ex-girlfriend, who is Wynter’s mother, and then kidnapped the two-year-old by driving away 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 Detroit suburb about 90 miles east of Lansing, spotted the Impala and attempted to conduct a traffic stop. Trice sped off but crashed into another police car after a brief chase, the affidavit states. While investigators found “a significant amount of blood in the vehicle consistent with Trice’s stab wounds,” as well as parts of a pink charging cable, there was no sign of Wynter, sparking a frantic search, the affidavit states.
Trice denied kidnapping Wynter and said he last saw her with her mother. FBI agents used cell phone locations to track Trice’s whereabouts after the kidnapping. Shortly before 7 p.m. on July 5, 2023, officers found Wynter’s body in a Detroit 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 charger cord found on the body,” the affidavit states. “The pink cell phone charger cord was consistent with the pink cord pieces found in the Chevrolet Impala.”
Cannon called her granddaughter a “brilliant, bright and very loving toddler.”
“She was so full of love,” she said.
Trice eventually pleaded guilty in state and federal court. The judge also sentenced him on Friday to 60 to 90 years in prison for first-degree sexual abuse for sexually assaulting Wynter’s mother. Trice reportedly refused to make a statement at his court hearing. Sentencing in his federal case is scheduled for next Friday, according to documents. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison; federal prosecutors declined to seek the death penalty.
David Harris contributed to this report.
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