A married Maryland man opened fire on his secret lover and her family members after she asked for child support, but a survivor lived to tell the truth.
Keanan Turner had a wife, a daughter, and a job requiring government security clearance. All of it was about to come crashing down after the birth of his child with old high school acquaintance Ebony Wright.
When she invited him to meet his 3-month-old son on April 12, 2021, Turner showed up with a gun and black rubber gloves tucked into his pocket. He fatally shot Ebony and her mom, Wanda Wright, the baby’s grandmother. Then, he shot Ebony’s sister and lit the apartment on fire “to kill the child” and destroy evidence of his double life, read a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C.
On July 26, a jury convicted the 35-year-old on two counts of premeditated first-degree murder while armed, arson, and several other charges. He now faces life in prison; Maryland does not have the death penalty. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for October.
His conviction hinged on testimony from a star witness, Ebony’s sister Destiny Wright, who miraculously survived being shot point-blank in the face.
“He intended to prevent [Ebony] going forward with the custody suit,” federal prosecutor Emma McArthur said during her closing arguments. “He tried to burn his secret life to the ground.”
Destiny, now 22, admitted on the stand that tensions were running high between her family and Turner, who had a history with Ebony dating back to Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where they were both classmates. The two had reconnected in 2019, and Turner allegedly refused to acknowledge the baby and was angered over the child support request. But on the afternoon of April 12, 2021, all seemed calm when he arrived at the two-bedroom apartment in Southeast Washington to meet his son for the first time.
Turner sat for nearly an hour, chatting with Ebony and her mother, Wanda. He even held his son and gave the infant boy his bottle, reported The Washington Post. The visit was so ordinary that Destiny went to a back bedroom to rest in a rocking chair.
After a while, Turner excused himself to the bathroom, and when he returned, all hell broke loose. He put on his rubber gloves; at first, everyone assumed he would help give the baby a bath. Destiny told the court that she went to the bedroom for clean baby clothes when she heard gunshots ring out. She jumped into the closet, and then Turner burst into the room, saying, “They came in here. We got to go. We got to go.”
“I was terrified. Everything was confusing. I didn’t understand,” she recalled on the stand, adding that she was frozen with fear. When she told Turner she couldn’t move, he shot her directly in the face. “I just dropped to the floor. I was begging for him to stop,” she told jurors in tears. The bullet ripped through her cheek and exited her arm.
Destiny had been left for dead, but she managed to escape the apartment with her baby nephew, whom she found unharmed, lying between his deceased mother’s legs, sobbing, according to her testimony. Though she couldn’t speak because of her injuries, she called 911 and later scrawled Wright’s name on a sheet of paper and gave it to police, indicating he was the culprit, reported WUSA9.
Anne Guglik, a D.C. fire and arson investigator and a first responder on the scene, told jurors that someone had set the desk on fire, igniting paperwork from the D.C. Superior Court related to a child custody lawsuit. Authorities were able to recover some burned fragments and spotted Keanan Turner’s name.
Throughout the trial, Turner maintained his innocence and reportedly showed little emotion. His attorneys argued that an unknown assailant entered the Wright’s apartment, shot at the women, and then started a fire.
Without the murder weapon or any DNA evidence placing Turner in the apartment, the defense had plausible deniability. What’s more, Destiny had only met him once, on the day of the shooting, and could be misidentifying him, even though she said he introduced himself as “Keanan.”
Video from the family’s Ring camera showed a man nearly unrecognizable in a pandemic-era mask obscuring his face, a beanie, and a hoodie over his head — except for one detail.
“As he was running out of the apartment, the defendant attempted to remove a Ring camera on the front door and, in doing so, exposed a unique tattoo on his arm,” read the District Attorney’s press release. The tattoo was the birth date and name of his young daughter.
Turner was arrested at his father’s home amid hundreds of firearms tucked under mattresses and chair cushions, according to WUSA9, who then reported something surprising. After telling a member of the Capital Area Fugitive Task Force that he also worked for the government, Turner allegedly said, “Things went left, and that is why I did it.”
