Insets: Travis Wood (Charles County Sheriff's Office) and Shawnda Wood (Reese Funeral Home). Background: The 2300 block of Tawny Drive where Travis Wood shot Shawnda Wood to death (Google Maps).
Upset that his wife told him to move out of the family home because he urinated on the floor outside the bathroom after a night of drinking, a Maryland man waited until she went to bed and shot her dead in the back of the head.
Now 36-year-old Travis Edward Paschal Wood will spend the rest of his days behind bars for the murder of 32-year-old Shawnda Nicole Wood, the Charles County State Attorney's Office said.
The investigation began on Dec. 9, 2022, when Travis Wood walked into the Charles County Sheriff's Office and requested a welfare check on his home in Waldorf, a Washington, D.C., suburb, before asking for a lawyer.
Cops responded to the home in the 2300 block of Tawny Drive and entered through an unlocked door. Inside, they found Shawnda Wood dead from a gunshot wound to the back of her head in her bed. There was also a gun that had her husband's DNA on it.
Detectives learned that the couple went out to eat with their three children the night prior to the murder before returning to the home and dropping them off. The Woods then went to a hookah lounge where they had drinks and came home around 2 a.m. Sometime thereafter, Travis Wood urinated on the floor outside the bathroom.
This prompted the victim to tell her husband he needed to be out of the home by the weekend.
"While the victim lay in bed asleep, Wood retrieved his registered firearm and shot her one time in the back of her head," prosecutors wrote.
Around 8:30 a.m. on the day in question, the suspect woke up his three young daughters and told them they were going to their grandmother's house. He instructed them not to wake up their mother or go into her room. Then he drove the kids to his mother's house before returning to his home for a couple hours.
After he came back to his mom's house, he admitted to her that he killed his wife. He again returned back to his home before he went to the police station. Prosecutors did not say what he was doing in his home after the murder.
Assistant State's Attorney John Stackhouse spoke during the sentencing about the impact Shawnda Wood's death has had on her children:
These three little girls had to be taken out of their house, school, and neighborhood. They had to be taken away from all their friends. All those things are a result of his actions. Their lives have been changed forever. [The victim] never got the opportunity to do Girl Scouts with her girls, see them play sports, go on their first date, graduate high school or college, get married, or have kids. All of that was taken from her by the person who is supposed to protect his wife and kids. Little girls need their mother. All those things were taken from Shawnda and her kids too. The level of betrayal is immeasurable in this case. This has the added trauma of three little girls trying to wrap their mind around the fact that their father murdered their mother while they were asleep in their house.
Judge H. James West on Thursday sentenced Travis Wood to life in prison plus 15 years for first-degree murder and use of a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence.
"The loss is tremendous," the judge said. "It was done in the coldest of blood and I don't understand it. The level of violence was extreme. The callousness that followed is rarely seen. The damage done to two families was excessive and permanent."
Shawnda Wood's daughters were ages 11, 9 and 8 at the time of her murder.
"We are devastated that her precious life was taken away from us and her three beautiful daughters," her family wrote in a GoFundMe.
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