JiveBlog

When Keanan Turner came to meet his 3-month-old son for the first time, prosecutors told a D.C. Superior Court jury this week, he brought black rubber gloves and a gun.

He sat in the two-bedroom apartment on Good Hope Road in Southeast Washington for about 90 minutes that day in 2021, feeding the baby with a bottle and talking to the child’s mother and grandmother, the infant’s aunt, Destiny Wright, recalled in court.

Then she heard loud popping sounds that she said at first seemed to come from outside. Before Wright could react, she told the jury, Turner rushed into the bedroom where she had been retrieving clothes for her nephew, pointed the gun in her face and fired.

“I just dropped to the floor. I was begging for him to stop,” Wright, now 22, testified, pausing at times and turning away from the jury to fight tears.

Advertisement

On Friday, just three days after Wright testified and seven hours into deliberations, the jury convicted Turner of crimes that include two counts of premeditated first-degree murder while armed in the fatal shooting of Wright’s 48-year-old mother, Wanda, and 32-year-old sister, Ebony. He faces the possibility of life in prison upon sentencing, which is scheduled for October.

As he did through most of the week-long trial, Turner, 35, sat motionless in court Friday as the jury foreman repeated the word “guilty.”

Lawyers for Turner had argued an unknown person entered the apartment and shot the women before setting the unit on fire.

But in a calm, clear voice, Wright testified that she knew exactly who had fired the bullet that ripped through her cheek and exited her arm. Two jurors wiped tears from their cheeks as she recounted stumbling into the living room to find her mother and sister dead and the baby sobbing between her sister’s legs, unharmed.

Advertisement

She called 911 but could not speak because the damage to her face and mouth was so grave. In the ambulance, Wright said, she scribbled Turner’s name in a police officer’s notepad, identifying him as her assailant.

Turner, federal prosecutors Emma McArthur and Miles Janssen told jurors, was a married man with a young daughter whose name and birth date he had tattooed on his forearm. They said he was outraged that Ebony Wright, whom he had known in high school and reconnected with two years earlier, had filed child support papers a month earlier. Turner feared such legal procedures could jeopardize his family life in Forestville, Md., where he lived, as well as his government security clearance for his job as a licensed executive driver, prosecutors argued.

“He intended to prevent her going forward with the custody suit,” McArthur said during her closing arguments Thursday. “He tried to burn his secret life to the ground.”

Authorities never recovered the 9mm handgun used in the shooting, nor did they find Turner’s DNA in the apartment, argued his lawyers, Franz Jobson and K. Lawson Wellington. Destiny Wright, they said, misidentified Turner because she had only met him once, the day of the shooting. She and other family members disliked Turner because he refused to leave his wife for Ebony Wright or acknowledge that he was the father of her son, the lawyers said.

When Wright, the prosecution’s star witness, took the stand, she acknowledged the tension between her family and Turner, who was a classmate of her sister’s at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Md.

Advertisement

But that April day was supposed to deliver a long-awaited milestone for Ebony, who was impatient for her son to meet his father, Destiny Wright said.

Destiny Wright was the first to arrive at her sister’s apartment late that afternoon, she said. Her sister and nephew were already inside, and Turner arrived at the door minutes later, Wright said. Prosecutors in court displayed photographs of who they say was Turner, with a dark hat and coronavirus mask up to his nose, standing in front of a Ring security doorbell Wright said her sister had installed roughly three weeks earlier.

Once inside, Wright recalled, he said “hello” and introduced himself as “Keanan.” He matched the photos her sister had previously texted to her, Wright said.

Wright said Turner sat in a chair in the living room and held the baby and began feeding him. The visit was so uneventful at first that Wright said she excused herself to the back bedroom to rest in a rocking chair.

Advertisement

Her mother, Wanda, arrived at the apartment about 30 minutes later, Wright said, and “was very sweet and nice” to Turner, in support of her daughter.

About 90 minutes after arriving, Wright said, Turner stood up and asked to use the restroom. When he returned, he pulled out the rubber gloves and put them on, she recalled.

Wright said she and her sister had planned to bathe the infant when Turner left, so she went into the bedroom to look for fresh baby clothes.

It was then that she heard the gunshots. Turner, she said, ran into the bedroom, saw her in the closet and said, “They came in here. We got to go. We got to go,” she testified.

Wright said she was frozen with fear. “I was terrified. Everything was confusing. I didn’t understand,” she said.

With Turner standing over her, she said, she told him she couldn’t move. It was then that he pulled out a firearm and shot her, she testified. When she managed to flee the apartment with her infant nephew, she called 911.

Advertisement

“I just got shot in my mouth,” she tried to tell the operator, who could not understand her, according to court testimony. Prosecutors played the call and showed the jurors a photograph of the police officer’s notebook where Wright had scribbled her attacker’s name.

Among the evidence photos were images of a blackened, charred desk.

Anne Guglik, a D.C. fire and arson investigator and one of the first responders on the scene, told jurors that someone had set the desk on fire, igniting various sheets of paper gathered on top.

One of the pieces that was badly burned, Guglik testified, was labeled D.C. Superior Court — paperwork for a child custody lawsuit. Still visible among the ruined pages was a name: Keanan Turner.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaW5oamdkuKatzZqlZqylp7umvoymrKuclad6pLTIpZtmq6WlvbC%2B02g%3D