FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (WSVN) - The trial for a woman accused of killing her Miami Police officer boyfriend has begun, Tuesday.
Opening statements filled the room Tuesday morning as 47-year-old Tiniko Thompson stood charged with second-degree murder.
Thompson is accused of fatally shooting her boyfriend, Miami Police Officer Carl Patrick in their Pembroke Pines home in May of 2014.
According to prosecutors, Thompson falsely claimed to be pregnant. She took a leave from work, told everyone that she was due soon, but when her secret was about to be revealed, police said, she resorted to murdering Patrick.
Several cellphone pictures of Thompson’s pregnancy were sent to friends and family. She also texted them details of her pregnancy and told her boyfriend that they were having a baby girl. “They come up with a name, Victoria,” said prosecutor Shari Tate. “They set up a room, they buy baby items, they get baby gifts.”
The whole pregnancy actually turned out to be a lie. Prosecutors said Thompson had a hysterectomy nearly 20 years prior but still decided to continue with the story. “Tiniko Thompson is not letting this get exposed,” Tate said. “And it winds up with Carl Patrick being shot in uniform, shot and being left to die.”
Prosecutors said Thompson shot her boyfriend in the arm before she took his phone and let him bleed to death. They said she wrapped his body in comforters and then burned sage on top of the blankets.
Officials said she left Patrick’s body in place for several days while she went in and out of her house. She later wrote a letter that said the whole ordeal was an accident.
“But it’s more. All the thermostats in the house are turned all the way down,” Tate said. “There’s fans set up in the bedroom, blowing on the body to cool the air, to chill the air, to slow decomposition of the body.”
Thompson’s defense attorney claimed, on the morning of May 7, 2014, his client was defending herself. “I don’t know if he was trying to intimidate her or whether or not that time he truly, that time, was trying to kill her,” said Thompson’s defense attorney Roderick Vereen, “but he pulls out his firearm, and he sticks it right into her face and hits her on the mouth.”
Thompson claimed that they struggled, and that’s when the gun went off. Vereen claimed that the DNA evidence proved that she didn’t shoot Patrick. “And even if she was wrong about faking the pregnancy and running up his credit cards, she had a right to use self-defense.”
The trial is expected to last about two weeks.
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