A 101-year-old woman whose husband died during a violent 2017 home invasion took the stand Wednesday to describe the terrifying ordeal — in case she becomes too ill before prosecutors can bring the couple’s assailants to justice.
“Shut up, Shut up, I’ll kill you — Shut your mouth,” Ethlin Thompson recalled the man growling at her as he gripped her by the throat and bound her hands and feet in the bedroom of her Bedford-Stuyvesent home last October.
“I could barely breathe. I could hardly speak. It was a heavy hand [that] was choking me,” the widow murmured during the hearing, which was video-recorded. “I pray to God. I pray to God.”
Thompson suffers from chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure, prosecutors said before the hearing.
The aged woman’s own home health aid, Suzette Troutman, stands accused of concocting a plan to rob her clients — and allegedly roped in her nephew Dwayne Blackwood and pal Howard Morris to commit the crime.
Troutman, 46, waited in the getaway car as the men brutalized Thompson and her 91-year-old husband, according to prosecutors.
Troutman, Blackwood and Morris are charged with murder, burglary and assault for the heinous crime. If convicted, they face up to life behind bars.
In her heartbreaking testimony, Thompson recalled her final moments with her husband of 30 years.
She testified that before the attack, she lovingly fed husband, Waldiman, her homemade chicken noodle soup and then he laid down for a nap.
Thompson testified she then went out to run errands, came back and joined her husband in bed to nap – when she suddenly felt a stranger’s hand around her neck.
“I felt someone grab me, cover up my face and choke me,” she said.
She grasped for nearby scissors and cut her bindings, and then looked up and saw a man in the doorway — and her husband lying on the floor.
“Mr., Mr., call 911!” Thompson recalled that she screamed.
She was transported to the hospital, and returned to find her home ransacked, her safe pilfered, and $25,000 in cash missing.
Waldiman was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Her testimony continues Thursday.
