A 27-year-old man was found guilty Wednesday of second-degree attempted murder for stabbing an ex-girlfriend's mother and her fiance in their Columbia home last year.
Gregory Imes Jr., who has no fixed address, had smashed a glass door and repeatedly stabbed the couple Sept. 27, 2008, after becoming distraught over the breakup of his relationship. He will be sentenced Oct. 8.
Imes' sister testified against him, saying he wanted a confrontation with police so they would kill him. He deliberately returned to the neighborhood the day after the attacks, mixing with police and residents at another crime scene, but no one confronted him, Melinda Allen, Imes' sister, testified Wednesday in Howard County Circuit Court.
"He wanted to kill himself. He was suicidal," Allen testified at her brother's attempted murder trial before Judge Richard S. Bernhardt.
Imes' lawyer, Deputy District Public Defender Louis P. Willemin, argued that the knife attacks were unplanned and thus not first-degree attempted murder. "If his goal was to kill, nothing would have prevented him from doing so," Willemin argued.
Allen testified that Imes loved his girlfriend of six months, Camille Cokley, but told his sister he intended to kill the woman for breaking up with him.
Allen said she and other relatives tried to reason with Imes over the next day or two.
"You don't get to decide who lives and who dies," she said she told Imes. "I told him to turn himself in. He wanted to have the cops shoot him," Allen said about her conversations with her brother. He was arrested without resistance two days after the crime at a Laurel fast-food restaurant.
Imes had used a rock to smash a patio door and enter the house in the 10300 block Twin Rivers Road. Cokley had left the house the day before, she testified at the trial Wednesday, after she said Imes threatened her in a series of phone calls.
Both victims, Maria Elana Cokley and Reginald Crudup, suffered serious injuries and heavy blood loss and were rushed to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Both identified Imes as their attacker, and both also testified at his trial, which began Tuesday without a jury.
