Following a jury trial, Fernando Collymore was found guilty of the felony murder of Rosita Gates as well as the theft by taking of Gates’s vehicle.1 Collymore now appeals, contending that the trial court: 1 gave the jury an improper charge on the concept of accident; 2 improperly sentenced him to a felony rather than a misdemeanor for theft by taking; and 3 improperly allowed the jury to use a yardstick and a ruler during deliberations. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.
1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the record shows that, on September 5, 2011, Gates told friends that she intended to break up with her live-in boyfriend, Collymore, on the following day. On the morning of September 6, 2011, Terrieon Dennard, Gates’s son, was sitting downstairs in his mother’s house when he heard her screaming his name from her bedroom. Terrieon ran upstairs to discover that the bedroom door was locked. Inside, Gates continued to scream for assistance, and she told Terrieon to call police and let them know that Collymore had a gun. Terrieon heard continued fighting inside the bedroom, and he ran downstairs to call for help. While downstairs, he heard a single gunshot, and he ran out of the house. Moments later, Terrieon witnessed Collymore leave the house with a gun in his hand. Collymore then fled to New York in Gates’s 2009 Ford Taurus. When police arrived, Gates was discovered in the bedroom with a fatal gunshot wound to her chest. Forensic testing showed that there was no gunpowder on Gates’s shirt, so, according to a firearms expert, Collymore had to be at least three-and-a-half feet away at the time that he pulled the trigger of the gun. After he was apprehended, Collymore contended that the shooting was an accident, maintaining that he was attempting to kill himself and that the gun went off when Gates tried to take it away from him. To counter this contention, the State put forth evidence showing that, when she was a child, Gates accidentally shot and killed her mother in a firearm accident. As a result, Gates was phobic of guns and repeatedly said that she would never touch one again.
