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Wal-Mart suspects charged

LAKEWOOD: Two of four charged may face death

BY ADAM LYNN AND STACEY MULICK | The News Tribune • Published June 05, 2009

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In a sense, the robbery and slaying of Loomis armored car guard Kurt Husted was a sophisticated endeavor.

Pierce County prosecutors wrote in court documents that three of the four people now charged with murdering Husted planned the attack for a month, and two of them spent the three days before the robbery at the store where they “timed and the guard carrying the money bags.”

“In another sense, it was amateur city,” deputy prosecutor Mark Lindquist said Thursday after the four alleged conspirators were charged with multiple crimes.

The two men who carried out the killing and robbery did nothing to hide their faces from the surveillance cameras trained on the store’s entrance, and they and their accomplices didn’t immediately leave town after the attack.

In fact, according to court records, two of them went out for a $175 dinner at a local Red Lobster that evening.

Their mistakes led to their quick capture Wednesday by multiple police agencies led by the Lakewood Police Department.

On Thursday, the four were charged with multiple felony counts – two of them with the state’s highest crime – in Husted’s death.

Aggravated first-degree murder charges were filed against Calvin Finley, 34, and Marshawn Turpin, 20. The two also were charged with first-degree murder, firstdegree robbery and first-degree assault. Finley, already a convicted felon, also was charged with firstdegree unlawful possession of a firearm.

Judge Frederick Fleming, citing the “grievousness of the alleged crime,” ordered Finley and Turpin each jailed in lieu of $5 million bail during their arraignments in Pierce County Superior Court.

Aggravated first-degree murder is the only crime in Washington punishable by death. Lindquist said a decision on whether to seek the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without parole – the only other sentence available for an aggravated murder conviction – has not yet been made.

Prosecutors charged the other two suspects – Odies D. Walker, 41, and his girlfriend, Tonie Marie Williams-Irby, 42 – with firstdegree murder and first-degree robbery. They each were ordered held in lieu of $2 million bail.