Judge rules after Macon woman seeks immunity, claiming she shot her husband in self-defense
A Macon woman accused of killing her husband claimed Monday afternoon in court that her family was in danger, but a judge ruled it was up to a jury to decide.
Lateesha Riddle, 35, testified in front of Macon Judicial Circuit Judge Jeffery Monroe at the Bibb County Courthouse that, on the night of Oct. 2, 2022, when her husband, Eddie Riddle, 47, died, her mother and children were in danger. She requested to be immune from prosecution. If she had not shot him, “it would have likely ended in some type of murder or murder-suicide,” she told the judge.
However, after Monroe heard testimony from the family present at the house that night and the investigator assigned to the case, he said he didn’t know what to make of the evidence and denied her request.
“The court doesn’t see that anybody had played fast-and-loose with the truth and shaded it to any regard where [the witnesses] were trying to get their version of the facts over, above and beyond anyone else,” said Monroe. “But the court is left with some questions, to be honest.”
Reza Sedghi appeared as Lateesha Riddle’s attorney while Kyle Owenby prosecuted the case on behalf of the state.
How it all started
Before Eddie Riddle was allegedly shot to death by Lateesha Riddle, the pair first argued regarding her talking to her step-brother the day before. He told Lateesha Riddle that he didn’t appreciate her talking to “random people on his back porch,” but she ignored him and went to Walmart to buy groceries to prepare dinner in the evening, according to court documents.
As she bought groceries, she got a call from Eddie Riddle, who was upset that he couldn’t get the football game between the Florida Gators versus the Eastern Washington Eagles on his TV. Lateesha Riddle replied that she would be back.
She came back, put ESPN on the TV and began washing the collard greens when Eddie Riddle started arguing about how she needed to let him know when she left the house. When he mentioned that she knew he was watching the game and wanted it on, she replied that it was “not my fault you don’t know how to operate a smartphone.”
“That made him angry,” Lateesha Riddle told investigators. “And so he got up, pushed everything off the counter of the kitchen, pushed everything onto the floor.”
Her mother, Sheila Taylor, 58, got in between the two with her hands up. As Eddie Riddle pushed Lateesha Riddle and her mother into appliances in the kitchen, the pair’s youngest daughter came into the room crying.
Eddie Riddle then grabbed their daughter and threw her to the ground. Afterward, he went into their room to get his gun, which is something he commonly did.
“He was at a level that he’s never really been before,” Lateesha Riddle said. “He typically wouldn’t argue in front of my mother, the kids, or even get physical — anything like that.”
But as Eddie Riddle got his gun, Lateesha Riddle grabbed her own gun from her purse, cocked it and put it inside the diaper drawer in their family room. He returned, with his gun in the pocket of his basketball shorts, and attempted to push Lateesha Riddle and her mother outside of the house, telling them to get out, through the family room.
During this moment, Eddie Riddle mentioned that he wasn’t going to jail and that “we’re all gonna die in this (expletive) today.”
Taylor then grabbed a nearby pink toddler chair and tell Eddie Riddle that if he hit her, she would hit him with the chair.
Eddie Riddle then stepped toward Taylor with a raised fist. But before he could punch her, Lateesha Riddle took out the gun from the diaper drawer and shot him twice.
‘That was the reason the firearm was pulled’
Sedghi mentioned to the judge that Eddie Riddle was 5-foot-9, weighed around 340 pounds and was a man who took Nugenix Total-T, a testosterone booster, for weightlifting. He indicated that rages like the ones Eddie Riddle experienced on the day he died are related to the supplement he takes to bulk up. Further, because Taylor was only about 5 feet tall and weighed around 160 pounds, one punch from Eddie Riddle could have caused substantial trauma, brain injury or even death.
“This was the first time that he had ever tried to strike Miss Taylor,” Sedghi said. “And that was the reason the firearm was pulled. ... I honestly believe that had that not have happened, you would have seen possibly three, four or five people dead in that house. Not just Mrs. Riddle, possibly Miss Taylor [and Lateesha Riddle’s children],“
But Owenby, the prosecutor of the case, believed that “this is an issue of excessive force.”
“We don’t know what was going through [Eddie Riddle’s] mind,” Owenby said. “For all we know, he’s raising his fist to pound the table, to pound his side. He might even plan to put his fist through a wall. We don’t know, but what is described to us here today does not rise to the level ... of an imminent threat of bodily harm.”
What led to the judge’s decision
In ruling that would deny the request for Lateesha Riddle to be immune from prosecution, the judge explained that he could not answer whether she was reasonable in exercising the force that led to Eddie Riddle’s death.
He acknowledged that Lateesha Riddle anticipated that something was going to happen considering Eddie Riddle had gone to his room to get his gun, “and you were prepared.”
However, the judge mentioned that he didn’t know the truth of whether Lateesha Riddle heard Eddie Riddle tell her and her mother to get out of the house during the argument, or whether he threatened that everybody in the house was going to die. If she had heard Eddie Riddle tell her and her mother to get out, “the better part of discretion would have been to get out.”
But if she had believed Eddie Riddle threatened everybody in the house, “you had to arm yourself accordingly to fend off from that.”
“The court won’t insert itself into that particular calculation,” Monroe said. “That’s going to be something that a jury of your peers is going to have to hear your evidence and come to a determination.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2025 at 1:55 PM.
