Witness recalls seeing 'angry' man get gunned down

Terrell Screws died an angry man.

A witness in the murder trial of Raymond Richmond said that before he was gunned down outside an apartment at 1051 Winston Road, Screws was pacing back and forth, carrying a pistol.

"He was angry," testified Teondra Wofford, who was visiting Screws the night of Nov. 8, 2013. "He had a gun in his hand."

She at first saw Screws pacing outside the apartment that police said he and other men rented to deal drugs. She said she went inside, and so did he, still pacing, before he went back outside, and she followed.

She had just stepped out the front door of the house converted to apartments when she heard repeated gunfire, she said. She looked to one side just in time to see Screws fall, and then saw three people run from the yard to a car. One of them was Richmond, she said.

She did not see anyone fire a gun, though, and said her recollections were vague because she had tried to forget the shooting.

Police called to the scene around 10:30 p.m. found Screws lying on his back, his arms outspread, with bullet casings and trash scattered around him. Officers said they found so many shell casings that they weren't sure which ones came from Screws' shooting and which were leftover from other incidents.

Detectives said shootings were not uncommon in the area. The apartment obviously was rented only for drug deals, they said. It had no food in it, just some scales and sandwich bags for weighing and packaging drugs, and some liquor bottles. Police Sgt. Matt Blackstock said the place looked ransacked. "It was run down. It was not clean," he said.

Besides bullet casings, officers found "a lot of debris, a lot of trash spread out in front of the house," he said.

Catherine Jordan, a firearms examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab, said that from the shell casings and bullets police recovered, she could tell at least two guns were fired at Screws, one a 9 mm and the other a .40-caliber. Other cartridge casings police collected showed signs of having been out in the weather, and likely were unrelated to the shooting, she said.

Deputy GBI Medical Examiner Jacqueline Martin said her autopsy showed Screws had five bullet wounds -- one in his left arm where the bullet lodged, another that entered and exited his torso from the side without penetrating the abdominal cavity, a third that entered the left armpit and exited the chest without penetrating the chest cavity, and two severe wounds caused by bullets entering his left back at the shoulder, one penetrating his lungs, the other puncturing his lungs and heart.

Assistant District Attorney Chris Williams said Screws, 27, was "ambushed," shot from both the front and back.

Williams in his opening statement Tuesday acknowledged that Richmond was accused of being one of several shooters, and police had recovered no guns from the shooting and had no fingerprints placing him at the crime scene.

In her opening, defense attorney Cynthia Lain said Richmond, 29, was not at the Winston Road apartment when Screws was shot. Her client had left before the shooting, and was with friends in a car on Macon Road when he got a call telling him Screws was dead, she said.

The trial resumes this morning at 9 in Muscogee County Superior Court Judge Gil McBride's 11th floor courtroom in the Columbus Government Center.

This story was originally published October 20, 2015 at 10:34 PM with the headline "Witness recalls seeing 'angry' man get gunned down ."