Nearly five months after pleading guilty to killing 2-year-old Wynter Cole-Smith, Rashad Trice was formally sentenced the life in prison without parole.
Trice entered guilty pleas for first degree murder and criminal sexual conduct relating to an assault on the little girl’s mother on July 1, the Lansing State Journal reported. In addition to life in prison on the murder charge, he was sentenced to 60 t0 90 years, to be served concurrently, for the assault.
He previously pleaded guilty to a federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death in March and is set to be sentenced in US District Court on Friday. The mandatory sentence for the plea deal is also life in prison.
Trice was charged with kidnapping Smith on July 2, 2023, as CrimeOnline previously reported. He was arrested just hours after the kidnapping, but the toddler’s body wasn’t found for three more days in an alley near Young International Airport.
In the plea agreement filed in March with the US District Court in the Western District of Michigan, Trice, who was not the toddler’s father, acknowledged that he kidnapped the little girl from her Lansing home because of a dispute with the girl’s mother and drove to the the Detroit area. He said he repeatedly played a YouTube video “in an attempt to pacify the victim.”
Once in the Detroit area, Trice drove to the alley, “where he strangeld the victim to death with a pink cell phone cord” and left her body there.
The little girl’s grandfather, Almount Smith Sr., gave an emotional statement to the court before the sentencing.
“The big question was, ‘Why?,'” Smith said. “Wynter was my first blood, my only grandchild.”
Smith said the words “coward,” “monster,” and “killer” were inadequate to describe Trice.
“To me, you’re none of that,” he said. “To me, there is no word that describes you.”
Ingham County Public Defender Keith Watson told the State Journal that Trice decided to plead guilty against his advice.
“I don’t know what speaks more loudly about remorse than pleading guilty to a mandatory life sentence, he said.
But Assistant state Attorney General Danielle Russo Bennetts said Trice had shown “accountability here but not remorse.”
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[Featured image: Wynter Cole Smith/handout]
