Background: A section of Ardmore Street in Memphis, Tennessee (Google Maps). Inset: Elita Bean (Shelby County District Attorney’s Office).
A woman in Tennessee has been found guilty of killing her husband in front of their children after an argument over keys.
Elita Bean, 47, was convicted by a Shelby County jury of voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment in the death of 41-year-old Terrence Bean, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office announced.
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On May 21, 2024, the husband and wife were arguing at their home on Ardmore Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Their children were there as well, and one daughter told investigators her account of what happened.
The argument was over “keys,” the child said, according to an affidavit filed in the case, though authorities did not share more specifics. However, the argument reportedly “escalated,” and Elita Bean grabbed a knife and tried to stab her husband in the kitchen.
The husband and wife continued to verbally spar, and they went into their bedroom, the girl said. They returned to the kitchen, “where the fight escalated” once more.
Elita Bean ended up on the ground, the court document states, noting that Terrence Bean had no pants on.
The defendant asked her daughter “to get her gun,” but Terrence Bean apparently grabbed it instead and gave it to his wife, “telling her to shoot him.”
Elita Bean then shot her husband three times.
The Memphis Police Department was called to the home at about 10 p.m. Officers arrived to find kids outside who “told them that their mother shot their father.”
Officers continued inside, where they found Elita Bean in the kitchen. Terrence Bean was “lying face down on the kitchen floor suffering from a gunshot wound.”
Emergency workers also arrived at the scene and pronounced the victim dead.
There were also three spent shell casings and a “large knife” in the kitchen garbage can, as well as a 9 mm handgun in the bedroom. The defendant said she had been “fighting the victim over the gun, and the gun went off.” She was detained, with authorities noting she “was highly intoxicated.”
When investigators examined Terrence Bean’s body, they learned that he had one gunshot wound “around the lower left chest area.” He also had “two wounds in the middle of his chest that were consistent with stab wounds from a knife,” as well as a “deep cut to his right middle finger and a cut to his left forearm,” also apparently consistent with knife cuts.
It was not immediately clear when Elita Bean is due to be sentenced.
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