Nursing home love triangle ends in homicide

updated 3:04 p.m. ET June 24, 2005

ATLANTA - Furious that their romance was ending, a 78-year-old great-grandmother shot her 85-year-old ex-beau to death as he read the newspaper in a senior citizens home, police said.

“I did it and I’d do it again!” Lena Driskell yelled to officers who arrived at the home June 10, according to testimony. Police said she was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, waving an antique handgun with her finger still on the trigger.

She is accused of plotting the shooting of Herman Winslow because she was angry that their yearlong romance was ending and he had found another companion.

Driskell was released on a $25,000 bond and placed under house arrest after a hearing Friday. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Richard Hicks stipulated she must wear an ankle monitor and live with her granddaughter Lena Holt.

“I don’t want her on the streets,” Hicks said. “Who knows how many other guns she has?”

After the nasty breakup with Winslow, she kept showing up uninvited at his apartment in Hightower Manor, the complex for seniors where they lived, Detective D.B. Mathis said. A security guard tried to calm her down, but Driskell drew out her gun, pressed it to Winslow’s head and fired up to four times, Mathis said.

At the hearing Friday, defense attorney Deborah Poole stressed Driskell’s clean criminal record and said she had had the gun since 1957. “She’s not a threat to anyone,” Poole said.

Driskell whispered angrily to her lawyer when the detective recounted her confession.

Her granddaughter, who was named for her, said Driskell and Winslow had shared a bank account and a love for traveling

“What drove her to something like this is beyond me,” a teary Holt said outside the courthouse.

“We have no control over what she did, but we are very sorry,” Holt said.

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