Mom awaits verdict in death of daughter’s rapist
The panel was expected to resume deliberations Friday after spending more than six hours weighing a second-degree murder charge against Kimberly E. Cunningham, 33, in the 2003 shooting of her daughter’s uncle, Coy Hundley.
Cunningham, who could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted, was being retried after another jury acquitted her on a first-degree murder charge in April but deadlocked on the lesser charge.
She testified through tears on Wednesday that she “heard shots and I heard screams, but I didn’t know it was me” shooting Hundley eight times in the parking lot of the Alcoa lock company where he worked.
“I was not a normal person that day,” she said.
Cunningham testified her youngest daughter, then 14, told her that morning that Hundley raped her twice when she was 10. Hundley laughed when she confronted him about her daughter’s allegations and asked what she was going to do about it, she said.
Cunningham unloaded her five-shot revolver, which she had a permit to carry, wounding him four times. Then she reloaded and shot him four more times in the head.
“I lost myself,” she testified.
“As a parent, if that happens to you, if that doesn’t qualify as putting you in a state of passion, please tell me what would?” defense attorney Bruce Poston asked the jury.
But Assistant District Attorney Robert Headrick said the killing was no accident. “I submit to you that she certainly had a conscious objective or desire to cause his death,” he said.