Rico Gray: 'I was begging for my life'

Rico Gray, Sr says Marissa Alexander beat him in front of his children, then got a gun and fired it at them.  He says he never hit her once but she punched him in the eye.

Rico Gray, Sr. is the man whom Marissa Alexander says was beating her before she got a gun and fired a warning shot into the ceiling.

She says she feared for her life and tried to claim the Stand Your Ground defense.  It was denied in court, and later she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.

In an interview with WOKV, Gray gave his side of the story saying that he was actually the one in fear for his life that night.  He also gave new information that the two of them were back together as a couple in between August  and December of 2010.

On August 1, 2010 Rico Gray says he and Marissa Alexander were looking at pictures of their newborn daughter on Alexander’s cell phone.  The baby was still in the hospital at the time.

When Alexander went to the bathroom, Gray says he looked in her text messages and saw that she had sent pictures of their daughter to her ex-husband Lincoln Alexander.

He opened the unlocked bathroom door to confront her about the texts.  He says Alexander was angry he looked, and the two exchanged some name-calling.

Gray said he told Alexander that their relationship was over.  They’d been married for two and a half months at the time.

When Gray went to tell his two children to get ready to leave the house, he says Alexander came in and started beating him in front of them.  He says he was trying to protect his face from her punches.

“I yelled out, ‘the baby probably isn’t mine.  It’s probably Lincoln’s baby,’ but not in those words,” Gray said.  “And she immediately stopped hitting me and said, ‘I got something for your ass.’ And that’s when she walked away from me, and walked out of the house into the garage and got a gun and came back inside the house.”

Gray says while she was in the garage he was trying to get the kids ready to leave.  Then she came back with the gun.

“The gun was pointed at me.  I was begging for my life, ‘Marissa, please put the gun down. Put the gun down.’”

Gray said he took his eye off her to look at his kids, and that’s when he heard the gun go off.

He also said that Marissa Alexander had threatened to shoot him before that incident.

Gray says he lied in his deposition to try and protect Alexander.

“I love Marissa.  No doubt.  I didn’t want her to go to jail.  So I was having mixed feelings.  But at the same time I felt that I needed to help her.  And she asked me to help her.  That’s why I lied on my deposition…to help Marissa.”

Gray says he told police that he was beating her and that’s why she had to fire the weapon.

During the months between August and December 2010, the two got back together.   Gray says he provided photographic evidence to State Attorney Angela Corey’s office.  The pictures reportedly show him and Alexander together looking happy next to their new daughter.

Gray says the pictures prove that they were together after the shooting because their daughter had been at the hospital the entire time leading up to the incident on August 1^st.

“She promised me that nothing like that would happen again in front of my kids,” Gray said.

On December 31, 2010 Rico Gray says he told Alexander that there wasn’t trust in their relationship.  He told her that she wasn’t going to spend the night and she calmly packed up her stuff to leave.  He says he even helped her get ready to leave.

But later, Gray says she came inside the house and struck him in his eye in front of his children.  He says that she left in such as hurry that she forgot her shoes.

When Alexander was released from jail, her bond stated that she would make no contact with Rico Gray.  The incident on December 31 put her back in jail.

Rico Gray also commented on his past.  He says the media has labeled him as an abuser, yet he’s only had one misdemeanor charge in 2006 for domestic violence.  He says at the time he was in an argument with his significant other and he pushed her out of the way.  He says he never hit her but it was a shove.

Alexander was charged with the same after she hit Rico Gray on December 31.

“If that one domestic violence is going to label me as an abuser, Marissa should also be labeled as an abuser because she got the same charge that I got.”