Timothy Lewis, left inset, is accused of killing his wife, Jacqueline Beason, right inset. (Crime scene screenshot from FOX6 News/YouTube; mug shot from Milwaukee County Jail; Victim’s photo from Facebook)
A Wisconsin husband shot and killed his wife with a single bullet to her head as she sat in her car outside a beauty salon in downtown Milwaukee on her 60th birthday because he “got tired” of being yelled at, authorities said.
Timothy Darnell Lewis, 59, was charged with first-degree reckless homicide and use of a dangerous weapon in the killing of his wife, Jacqueline Beason, court documents said.
She was killed last Saturday around 12:45 p.m. in the 800 block of North Cass Street.
According to a criminal complaint obtained by Milwaukee FOX affiliate WITI, a Milwaukee police officer responded and found the victim unconscious, slumped toward the passenger side of her gray Toyota Corolla. Local ABC affiliate WISN reported from the complaint what he told investigators after his arrest.
“Lewis said that his wife and her daughter were yelling at him and he got tired and took out his gun,” the station reported he told investigators. “He said that he ‘Just lost it right there.’ Lewis said he shot her one time and that he thinks he shot her in her jaw. He said that he is the one who did it; no one else did it.”
At the crime scene, the officer who responded saw a “noticeable amount of blood and white substance” coming from her head, caused by a single gunshot wound, the document said.
He performed CPR until paramedics arrived, but she was declared dead at the scene.
Medical examiners arrived and determined she had been shot in the left cheek. A bullet protruded from the back of her head, the document said.
She’d been on the phone with her daughter in the moments before she was shot, the complaint said.
The daughter heard the two arguing on the phone. She heard her mother tell Lewis that he had been “disrespectful to her and her daughters,” the document said.
When the daughter heard her mother say to Lewis, “Put that gun away,” the daughter yelled, “He has a gun?”
“It’s fake,” her mother said, according to the document.
“There you go,” she heard Lewis say before the phone went silent, according to the documents.
“She did not hear any gunshots, and it sounded as though the phone was shut off,” the document said.
Police interviewed a witness who saw the incident from across the street. The witness told police she had seen a Black male leaning into a Corolla while pointing a black semiautomatic pistol at a woman in the driver’s seat, the complaint said.
The witness said she could hear the woman in the car say that she had recordings of how he treated her and to get away from the car.
“She then heard the male say, ‘Okay,’ and she then heard one gunshot,” the complaint said.
The shooter then walked to a Mercedes and drove off, the witness told police, according to the complaint.
Her daughter is shattered.
“I’m so hurt, lost angry confused …. I just don’t understand,” she wrote on Facebook. “My life will NEVER ever be the same. I went from celebrating my Moms 60th birthday to planning her funeral all within 24 hours. This has to be a nightmare.”
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