'This ain't no setup?': Slain woman's texts to accused killer reveal qualms just before her death

Makeida Thompson worried her ex-boyfriend — the father of their 1-year-old son — was setting a trap when he invited her to his grandmother’s Pittsburgh house to clear the air.

Thompson and Terrence Washington recently had broken up. Hundreds of text messages they exchanged, read Wednesday by a detective during Washington’s homicide trial, overflowed with expletives and accusations.

Six days before the meeting, Thompson got a temporary restraining order. The 32-year-old Clairton woman, who worked as a juvenile probation officer, had told a judge she feared Washington was going to harm her, court transcripts show.

“Don’t get near the courts,” Washington, now 40, texted Thompson the day the restraining order was granted. “It will get ugly for you.”

Thompson arrived at the house on Rippey Street in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood around 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 10, 2020.

“And this ain’t no setup?” she texted.

Fifteen minutes later, Thompson was dead — by Washington’s hand, police said.

Pittsburgh police said Washington fired seven shots at Thompson while their son was in the room. Four struck Thompson.

‘That’s what you get for messing with me,” Washington allegedly said after the shooting, his grandmother testified Tuesday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.

On Wednesday, more than four years later, Washington sat in a white button-down shirt and greenish khakis as nine different police officers testified about the evidence against him.

Washington has been in the Allegheny County Jail since authorities apprehended him in Seattle more than a month after the shooting.

He has claimed he fired at Thompson in self-defense.

Body-worn camera footage showed Pittsburgh police Det. Joseph Fabus jotting notes in the Rippey Court home’s stairwell, asking Washington’s grandmother, Darlene Washington, questions as she struggled to speak over her screaming great-grandson.

Thompson’s body remained slumped over the armrest of a couch.

“(Washington) pulled out the gun and just started shooting her,” Darlene Washington told police in the footage.

Police found ballistics evidence on the floor of the home’s living room and kitchen. Traces of blood were spattered on the white ceiling.

Authorities didn’t discover Thompson’s black .22-caliber pistol, which she was licensed to carry and had tucked into her sweatpants’ waistband, until they moved her body.

Police extracted more than 40,000 pages of data from Thompson’s pink iPhone, Pittsburgh police Detective Janine Triolo testified. It took her 45 minutes to read aloud just a sample of the texts from the months leading up to the killing.

Both Thompson and Washington used menacing language.

“Threaten me again and I’ll end your (expletive) life,” Thompson texted Washington on March 13, 2020.

On Nov. 4, 2020, six days before the shooting, Washington texted, “that’s your third strike.”

Thompson responded a short time later, “You’re forcing me to get a PFA (protection-from-abuse order) because I’m afraid for my well-being.”

“Not a threat,” he wrote.

Cops find tactical bag

On the day of the shooting, Washington asked a friend, Brittany Wilkerson, to store his black SUV in her North Side garage, Wilkerson testified. He was going out of town, she said he told her.

But Washington never returned.

Six days later, a SWAT team, working off an anonymous tip about Washington’s vehicle, knocked down Wilkerson’s front door and took her into custody for questioning. No charges were filed.

“I kept asking what was going on but nobody would tell me anything,” she testified.

One officer Wednesday showed surveillance camera footage of a person parking a black SUV in Wilkerson’s single-car garage. Another showed a photograph of an SUV glove box with Thompson’s restraining order inside.

A third Pittsburgh police officer, Detective Eric Crawford, showed jurors a black “tactical bag” he said was found in Washington’s vehicle.

The bag contained four gun magazines and boxes of ammunition, at least some of which matched the caliber of the casings found near Thompson’s body, Crawford testified.

Police said they found a fingerprint from Washington’s ring finger on one of the gun magazines.

Emotions briefly swelled when prosecutors showed a graphic image of Thompson’s body. At least three jurors looked away. Several of the victim’s family members wept or used tissues to wipe tears from their eyes.

Tense confrontation

At the end of the day, after the jury left the courtroom, at least one of Thompson’s relatives started shouting at Washington. A crowd formed as the man attempted to lunge at the defendant as sheriff’s deputies were leading him out of court.

“Whoa! Whoa!” multiple deputies shouted as they rushed between the two men.

Another pair of deputies grabbed Washington by the belt holding his shackles and hustled him out of the room.

“It was a setup — we all sat here and…heard it,” the man shouted. “Why we got to sit through this? It’s inhumane.”

The family declined to talk with a TribLive reporter after the proceedings ended for the day.

Trial is expected to resume Thursday.