Michigan man gets another life sentence in 2-year-old's kidnapping death

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — A federal judge has handed a Michigan man who pleaded guilty in the kidnapping and killing of his former girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter a second life sentence.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker sentenced Rashad Trice Friday, one week after he was sentenced to life in state prison without the possibility of parole on charges in Ingham County Circuit Court for the girl’s death and 60 to 90 years for assaulting her mother, the Detroit News reported.

According to prosecutors, Trice got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend at her Lansing apartment in July 2023. She stabbed Trice, who responded by stabbing her multiple times and sexually assaulting her. He then left.

The woman went to her mother’s apartment in the same complex, leaving her 1-year-old son and her 2-year-old daughter, Wynter Cole Smith, behind. Responding police couldn’t find the girl.

Trice crashed his car in a Detroit suburb after police spotted him, but the girl wasn’t with him. Searchers looked for her along a highway between Lansing and Detroit using dogs, drones and helicopters. FBI agents eventually found the girl’s body in an overgrown Detroit alley. She had been strangled with a cellphone cord.

Federal prosecutors took jurisdiction of the case because the car and other tools used in the crime were made outside Michigan.

Trice pleaded guilty March to a federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death, acknowledging he took the girl from her home as part of a dispute with her mother. Prosecutors dropped a count of kidnapping a minor, but Trice’s plea left him facing a mandatory life sentence.

“Mr. Trice deeply regrets these tragic events and he accepts responsibility for his actions,” Scott Graham, one of Trice’s attorneys, said in an email to The Associated Press on Friday.