Witness testifies Miller shot her, pregnant friend

It was about 8 a.m. June 11 when Heather Lowe drove her best friend to the Parkville home of the married man who got her pregnant.

"She wanted to talk to him about the baby," Lowe testified yesterday of her friend, Elizabeth Walters. "She got upset. A seven-months-pregnant woman with hormones raging, you want answers. You get upset."

More than two hours later, the man, David L. Miller, finally answered Walters' repeated phone calls and told her to meet him at a nearby shopping center, Lowe told jurors.

"Him and Liz had words," she said of the exchange in her car. "I turned back and that's when I saw a gun. He shot Liz in the head. I saw her go forward. Then he shot me."

The testimony came on the second day of Miller's double-murder trial in a case so emotionally wrenching that the lead homicide detective broke down on the witness stand and needed to be excused for a break.

Miller, 25, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Walters and the pair's unborn daughter. It is the first time a prosecutor has used Maryland's fetal homicide law to charge someone with killing an unborn baby.

A medical examiner testified yesterday that Walters was about 31 weeks along in her pregnancy and that the unborn baby could have survived had she been delivered immediately after Walters was shot.

Jurors were also sent from the courtroom yesterday when Miller asked the judge to allow him to fire the public defenders representing him and handle the case himself. After expressing frustration at lead defense attorney Alvin Alston's decision to ask no questions of most of the witnesses, the defendant eventually changed his mind and the trial resumed.

The defendant is also charged with attempted murder in the shooting of Lowe in her car.

Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Walters, 24, worked as a waitress at the Charles Village Pub in Baltimore and enjoyed a close-knit circle of female friends. She found out in late 2006 that she was pregnant and told those women.

"I was like, 'OK, what are we going to do?'" Lowe testified. "From then on, I was at her hip. ... We were going to take care of that baby, no matter what."

Another close friend, Athena Cymrot, chose a law school based on its proximity to Baltimore.

"I chose the University of Maryland because I wanted to be close to Liz and the baby," she testified, explaining that she had planned to watch the baby every Friday and Saturday night when Walters planned to go back to work at the pub after the birth.

The women testified that they didn't see Miller around their friend after she learned of the pregnancy. And as Walters got closer to her Aug. 16 due date, she became increasingly agitated about her inability to reach him.

"She wanted to speak to him," Cymrot said. " ... She was a little frustrated because she wanted to figure out what was going on with Dave Miller."

A friend of Miller's testified that the defendant told him that morning that he wanted to talk to Walters, but that he didn't want to do so at his house. "He wanted to do it in public," Ronald Underwood told jurors.

Photographs taken from surveillance cameras at the Parkway Crossing Shopping Center, just off Perring Parkway, show the black Cadillac that Miller was driving when he followed Lowe's gray Dodge Stratus into the parking lot.

There Miller climbed into the back seat of Lowe's car.

"I thought you got rid of it," Lowe quoted Miller as telling the mother of his unborn child.

Lowe said her friend responded that he knew she hadn't gotten rid of the baby, that she had left him a voice mail message saying it was a girl.

"You're not going to ruin my life," Lowe quoted Miller as saying just before she said he shot Walters.

Miller then turned the gun on Lowe and fired twice - including once after he saw her reach for her cell phone, she testified.

Walters was pronounced dead in her friend's car at 10:23 a.m., three minutes after Lowe called 911 to report that Miller had shot them both.

Dr. Tasha Greenberg, the assistant state medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Walters, testified that the blood and oxygen supply to the unborn baby would have been cut off when the mother died.

"For it to have been viable, it would have had to be delivered - and it would have had to be delivered immediately," she testified of the fetus, which weighed 3.3 pounds and measured 18 1/2 inches at the autopsy.

Asked what caused the death of the unborn baby, Greenberg told the jury, "The fact that [Walters] was dead and no one was able to deliver it."

The bullet that killed Walters traveled through her left cheek and brain stem, where the body's mechanisms for breathing and circulation are located, before becoming lodged in the base of her skull, the doctor said.

A Baltimore County police firearms examiner, Michael J. Thomas, testified that both that bullet and the one recovered by doctors at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center from Lowe's mouth were fired by a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver that the defendant's cousin said Miller gave him after the shootings.

The lead investigator, homicide detective Gary T. Childs, became choked up on the witness stand when trying to describe Lowe's condition when he first saw her at Shock Trauma. The young woman could not speak.

"I'm sorry, judge," the 35-year veteran police officer said after Baltimore County Circuit Judge Dana M. Levitz asked jurors to step out of the courtroom. "There's something about this case."

The jury is expected to begin deliberations today after attorneys offer closing arguments.

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