Unable to talk, Columbus woman shot by son types out testimony in ex-boyfriend’s trial
Using a keyboard from her wheelchair and her typed answers displaying on a TV screen for the jury, a Columbus woman accidentally shot by her son in 2019 testified Thursday against the ex-boyfriend accused of assaulting her.
Now 30 years old, she cannot walk or talk, because the 9-millimeter bullet her 6-year-old son fired while aiming for Anthony Maurice Gates hit her in the mouth and lodged in her spine, crippling her.
Gates is on trial for aggravated assault, among other charges. He is accused of provoking the shooting by threatening to kill the woman before setting the gun down to choke her with both hands, before the boy grabbed the pistol and fired.
Besides the woman’s youngest child, two siblings who were nine and 11 at the time also witnessed the shooting. They testified Wednesday. The oldest child, a daughter now 15, said the kids were awakened by their mother’s screaming about 2 a.m. , Oct. 4, 2019, and ran to her bedroom to find Gates pointing the gun at the woman.
She said her mother gave her a cell phone and told her to call the police, but Gates grabbed the phone and smashed it. She did not see her youngest brother pick up the pistol, but she saw him shoot it.
“He didn’t know what it was going to do,” the girl later told an interviewer questioning her at the Children’s Tree House Child Advocacy Center. “He knew how to shoot the gun, but he didn’t know how to aim it.... When he looked at mom, he started crying.”
Her wounded mother could say nothing, she told the interviewer: “All I heard was a gurgle sound coming out her mouth.”
Prosecutor Meghan Bowden played the girl’s recorded interview for jurors Thursday morning, before the mother testified that afternoon.
Typed testimony
The mother types that she could not remember the shooting. She wrote that she knew her son had shot her only because other relatives had told her so.
Bowden asked whether Gates had been violent with her before the shooting.
“Yes he has,” she wrote.
Did her children observe this violence?
“Yes they did,” she typed.
Did Gates try to choke her before?
“Yes he did,” she replied.
When Bowden asked her to describe a previous choking, the woman typed: “I can’t say really all I know is Anthony was really trying to choke me.” She did not use punctuation in her replies.
On cross-examination, Gates’ attorney Roberta Robinson asked whether relatives told the woman who shot her.
“Yes they did my son shot me but it was only because he was trying to get him away from me,” she typed, by “him” apparently meaning Gates.
She wrote that a sister who now cares for her told her how the shooting occurred, and told her that Gates previously had attacked her.
Robinson asked whether the woman ever hit Gates.
“Yes I did but it was only because he hit me first,” she typed.
Robinson asked whether she ever hit Gates, when he didn’t strike first. “No,” she replied.
The defense attorney told Judge Bobby Peters she had a video of the woman attacking Gates, and wanted to play it for the jury, to cast doubt on the witness’ credibility. Bowden objected, triggering a debate over whether the video was admissible.
Attorneys decided Robinson would show the witness the video, without the jury present, and then ask the question again. After seeing the video, she again was asked whether she hit Gates, without his retaliating.
“I can say that I did,” she wrote. When asked that again, with the jury present, she typed, “Yes.”
‘Play fighting’
Bowden asked the victim Thursday whether Gates previously had told her children that the couple’s battles were only “play fighting.”
“Yes,” she typed.
The prosecutor has told jurors Gates coached the kids to say the pair were “play fighting” the night of the shooting to minimize their dispute.
Whether Gates or the woman was the primary aggressor has been a point of contention. Bowden said it was Gates. Robinson said the woman regularly attacked Gates, hitting him in the head, face and body.
The woman’s two sons mentioned the couple “play fighting,” in their interviews at Children’s Tree House.
“I thought they were going to have a real fight,” the son who shot the gun said in his taped interview.
Bowden claimed Gates told the children other things to say, as he rushed their mother to the hospital that night.
The daughter, in her Children’s Tree House interview, recalled some of that.
“Don’t snitch. Don’t snitch. Don’t snitch. I don’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life,” she said he told them.
The couple’s fight that night was sparked by Gates’ checking her mother’s phone, and accusing her of cheating on him, the daughter said.
Gates, 29, could face decades in prison, if he’s convicted on all charges.
