Trisha Babcock Gunned Down in Bungled Robbery

Trisha Babcock

(Detroit, MI) It was around midnight on August 1, 2009 and Trisha Babcock was sitting in a parked car on the corner of West Outer Drive and Evergreen in Detroit with John Williams, a man she’d befriended a week before.  The neighborhood was seedy, but Trisha preferred the privacy and isolation the darkened street gave them.  They drank vodka and talked about how, at 24, she’d moved there to find work as an exotic dancer.  She said she knew that, having graduated in the top 10 students of her class, her parents would be disappointed, but the money was too good to pass up.  Suddenly, Trisha heard a gruff command coming from the driver’s side window beside her, and she turned to see a gun barrel pointed directly at her eye.  The pistol was pushed through the crack she’d left open for fresh air.  Looking past the gun, she was surprised by what she saw.

On the other side of the window stood a young African-American boy, 12-year-old Demarco Harris.  The boy began shouting, demanding items from the car.  Trisha didn’t obey, unable to wrap her head around the contrast between the weapon and its owner.  Demarco looked angry, but there was a childish innocence behind his eyes.  Trisha tried to talk him out of his assault, but her words were buried by nervous shouting.  She reached up to the gun, afraid, and saw the boy’s face change in an instant.  In a knee-jerk reaction, he pulled the trigger and her senses exploded while her chest was pounded by the impact of the bullet.  Her torso flew back as she reached onto John’s lap and tried to cry to him, but no words came.  The boy opened the door, grabbed Trisha’s purse, and ran away.  John stared down at Trisha’s glazed eyes a moment, and then opened his door and jumped out, gently laying her onto the seat.  He ran for help.

Trisha was left to wait in the car.  Numb from the shock of what just happened, she laid there, trying to get her limbs to move, to escape the car.  She could not be sure how much time had passed when she saw a police officer appear in the passenger window.  He threw questions at her, and she tried to answer them, but only gargling sounds came forth from her mouth.  He reclined the driver seat and laid her body straight across it cautiously.  Soon she was in an ambulance, and a hospital not long before that, but her life ended there.

Demarco Harris was tried in court as an adult, but the jury was hung and the case went on to a second trial.  Demarco took the stand on his own behalf despite the advice of his lawyers, claiming that another boy had bullied him into taking part.  This time, with the help of a 2 hour confession taped the night of his arrest, he was found guilty.    No sentence has been imposed.