FORT WORTH, Texas — A North Texas man convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her daughter in east Fort Worth back in 2018 was sentenced to death Wednesday.
Prosecutors said Paige Terrell Lawyer brutally killed 30-year-old O'Tishae Womack and 10-year-old Ka'Myria Womack. Tarrant County Assistant District Attorneys Lloyd Whelchel and Dale Smith said on April 5, 2018, Womack and her sister, Lashundra, went for a walk and saw Lawyer several times. The next day, O'Tishae Womack didn't show up for her morning walk with her sister – and she didn't answer phone calls, texts, or knocks on the door at her home, according to the attorneys.
Eventually, Lashundra got a key to her sister's east Fort Worth apartment and went inside, where she found the bodies of O'Tishae Womack and Ka'Myria Womack. Both had been strangled, they said. O'Tishae Womack's body was on the kitchen floor, with blood seeping out of her face and a grocery bag over her head. Ka'Myria Womack was found upstairs in a bedroom, covered with a blanket.
"Two lives were extinguished that day," Smith said. "Both died as a result of strangulation, the defendant's calling card."
Lawyer was arrested later near Nashville, Tenn., where prosecutors say he confessed to his uncle.
Prosecutors said Lawyer's DNA was found on the knot in the bag around O'Tishae Womack's head, under O'Tishae Womack's fingernails, on Ka'Myria Womack's shorts, inside Ka'Myria Womack's underwear, on a bleach bucket, and on a Lysol can. Lawyer’s fingerprint in Ka’Myria’s blood was also found on a mop.
Prosecutors suggested the mother and daughter were killed to keep O'Tishae Womack from testifying in an upcoming domestic violence trial against Lawyer. Lawyer was already facing charges of assault-family violence and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in which O'Tishae Womack was the victim, WFAA reported in 2018.
During the sentencing phase, prosecutors told jurors that Ka'Myria Womack had been raped.
"He brutally, with no justification, took the lives of two people," Whelchel told the jury. "He is not going to change. He is going to be a future danger. And you know that."
O'Tishae Womack's sister, Lashundra, read an impact statement after the sentence was issued by the jury.
"Your horrendous act has devastated our family," Lashundra said. "You took a huge chunk of our hearts ... You forever will be known as a murderer, a rapist, and a coward."
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