By PAUL MICKLE
TRENTON – Ivelis Turell told the first cop on the scene her six-year-old son Eddie had shot and killed her boyfriend when the man’s silver 9 mm Ruger accidentally went off the night of April 30, 2007.
Ivelis Turell, on trial for allegedly killing her boyfriend Michael Whitaker, tries to avoid having her picture taken at the Mercer County Criminal Courthouse.
A former Trenton street cop told the story in court yesterday soon after the jury heard an audio tape of the suspect admitting to detectives that she shot Michael Whitaker in a tussle for a gun she feared he was about to use on her.
It happened in the family home on Ferry Street at about 10:40 that night while Eddie and his 2-year-old brother were sleeping, the woman told detectives in an audio tape played in the courtroom of Mercer County Superior Court Judge Pedro Jimenez.
Prosecutors also played the audio of Turell’s call to 911, in which she says there’s been a shooting, that two might be dead and that two children are sleeping in the house.
The first officers on the scene that night found both boys asleep, which did not jibe with Turell’s initial statement about the boy, who has the name of her first husband but was Whitaker’s son.
In her statement to Trenton Detective Edgar Rios and others played in court, Turell said the couple argued often and that she knew what it meant when Whitaker ran upstairs during a fight that night: He was getting his gun.
It was on the bed when she reached the bedroom and she tried to snatch it away from him. It fired, and Turell said she thought the shot hit the wall. But then Whitaker went down.
“Mikey, you see what you’ve done. I love you,’’ Turell, by now in hysterics, told the detectives.
She ran downstairs, gun in hand, and somehow shot herself, she said, just as Whitaker reached her and started hugging her. They fell to the floor but managed to get up and go outside, where he fell on the pavement and she collapsed in the doorway.
She allegedly had shot him in the shoulder with a bullet that passed into his chest. She allegedly shot herself in the shoulder, but never told the first cops on the scene that she was wounded -- only that she was numb on her left side.
In the audio tape, Turell spoke of the gun as if it was hair-triggered. She said her young Eddie had gotten a hold of the gun a few months before and it accidentally fired.
A cop came to the house after that and told Whitaker he better get rid of the weapon, Turell told Rios. Friends and relatives also told her to leave Whitaker.
But he was her first real love, she told Rios, crying hysterically. She cried harder as she told of her toddler Giovanni loving his father so much.
“When his father came home, he’d be so excited. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’"
The mother said the older Eddie, named for another man, hated his biological father.