The family of a 17-year-old Ohio teen is struggling to come to grips with her death after she was fatally shot by her 28-year old ex-boyfriend earlier this week.
Trendell Goodwin was arrested and charged Tuesday with felonious assault by Dayton Police after turning a gun on his teen girlfriend LaShonda Childs.
With more details of the murder being released daily, it is also clear that Childs was in an escalating abusive relationship that she wrote about in a Facebook post just two weeks prior.
“If y’all see the signs, don’t ignore it,” she said. “I should’ve left that n**** a long time ago. Now I ain’t even safe in my own house…”
According to reports, police found an injured Childs on a Dayton street after responding to a report that a protective order had been violated. They immediately took her to the hospital where she later died.
“It’s very devastating,” Nina Childs, LaShonda’s mother, told WHIO. “It’s something that will be devastating for the rest of my life.”
The duo started dating last September though Goodwin initially lied about his age. He had claimed that he was just 20-years-old. The relationship quickly grew aggressive, and at time abusive, even after they broke up, her family says.
Childs filed for a protective order earlier this year, but her mother says it did little good. Goodwin would constantly call and harass her, even posting threatening messages on Facebook.
“LaShonda told me, ‘You know mom he made me walk from our house to his house with a gun pointed at my back. I was scared for my life as well as my family’s life’,” her mother said.
In the eerie Facebook post shared only weeks before her murder, Childs warned women against domestic abuse and the allure of a “crazy n****”
“Domestic violence is real, not just in movies,” she wrote. “This n**** done broke several phones, busted windows out, followed me from my house to wherever, bit me several times, threw me into walls, made me walk places with a gun to my back, put all my stuff in a sewer, held me hostage in a house and didn’t let me leave, sat and waited at abandoned houses and watched me…” she wrote, offering a glimpse into how her life was terrorized.
The felonious assault charge against Goodwin is expected to be upgraded.
