Oct. 10 (UPI) — A Tennessee man is charged with murder after he repeatedly ran over his ex-partner on her front lawn, police said.
Memphis police arrested Santrez Traylor, 34, for the murder of Amanda Petrowski, 31, with whom he had two children. Neighbors told police that they saw Traylor hitting Petrowski with a brick or a rock in front of her home before he got into his car and ran over her body.
“She was standing when he first hit her, and then she fell down and he repeatedly was hitting her with the brick, hitting her with the brick,” one neighbor told WHBQ-TV. “Kicking, punching her. He was trying to make sure she was dead.”
“We saw a car driving back and forth across the lawn, and we didn’t know what was happening from where we could see,” neighbor Jay Smoot told WREG-TV. “But it turned out we were witnessing the murder occurring.”
Neighbor Jay Smoot told WREG-TV that Traylor was in the process of leaving the scene of the crime when police arrived.
“He tried to flee the cops. He drove across the yard and into the street and the cops took off after him. That was the last of what we saw of the incident,” Smoot said. “We feel bad for the kids and for her mother. I heard when they told her mother what happened. It was just gut-wrenching.”
Traylor had been arrested several times before on domestic violence charges for stalking and beating Petrowski. Last month, he allegedly threatened to “beat her brains in.”
