Husband Was on Phone With Wife as Home Invader Shot Her

A Phoenix-area lawyer said Wednesday he was on the phone with his wife when she was killed during a middle-of-the night encounter with an intruder at the family's get-away and future retirement home in eastern Arizona. State police named a 14-year-old boy as a suspect in the killing, and authorities were searching for him. Ernest Collins Jr. told the AP that his wife, 54-year-old TerriLynne Collins, was killed early Tuesday while struggling with the intruder. She had been in the couple's home and went to a trailer on the property in response to a text for help from the couple's 18-year-old daughter. Collins said his wife called him before she went to the trailer and that he was able to hear much of what happened during the fatal encounter in Concho, a rural community about 160 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Collins said he didn't immediately understand what was going on when his wife called him after midnight and woke him from a deep sleep. She was apparently walking to the trailer where their daughter and the daughter's friend were staying at the time. As he listened to his wife confront the intruder, "I finally realized that she had someone at gunpoint," Collins said. After calling 911 and a neighbor, Collins got back on the call from his wife and heard her speak with the intruder, whom he thinks was wearing a ski mask and was armed with a knife. "I heard my wife telling him 'you're just a kid, you're just a stupid kid and you're going to ruin your life,'" Collins said. Collins said his wife yelled at their daughter and her friend to run from the trailer and they did, with the daughter hearing a gunshot as she got outside. "My wife did not come out of the trailer," the husband said. The suspect, Joshua Cade Richardson, is still at large. (More murder stories.)