Wake County chief public defender Charles Caldwell, left, extends a hand to his client, Daniel Joseph Steele, 25, as Steele made a Wake County court first appearance Monday, April 20, 2015. Steele is charged with the first degree murder shooting of his pregnant girlfriend Kimberly Dianne Richardson, 25, last weekend in Raleigh. Richardson died at WakeMed on Sunday but her child, a girl, survived. Steele's next court appearance will be Monday, May 11, 2015.
– A dying woman who had just been shot called 911 on Saturday night in Raleigh, NC, and said just enough to save her unborn baby, WNCN reports. Kimberly Richardson, 25, who was six months pregnant, made the chilling call behind the Triangle Town Center where she worked: "Help," she says. "I've been shot." Asked to give her phone number, she says, "I can't ... I can't talk." Between long silences, WRAL reports, Richardson added the key words: "He shot me." Richardson later died in hospital, and her daughter was saved by an emergency cesarean section. Richardson's boyfriend, 25-year-old Daniel Steele, was arrested at his home that night and promptly charged with first-degree murder. No motive was given, and it's not clear whether Steele is the baby's father, though one of Richardson's friends tells the News & Observer he is. We do know he once worked as a security guard at the Town Center, but quit in October. As for Richardson, "she was really, really happy" about being pregnant, says a friend, who describes her as devoted to faith and music. But the friend declined to say more: "I'd rather focus more on who she was as a person and how much she pursued the Lord and I want to focus on the good of that baby," she says. The baby is still hospitalized, her condition under wraps. Meanwhile, a fundraising account has raised nearly $9,000 as of this writing to help the family with funeral costs and possible medical bills for the daughter, who Richardson had already named Lacy Grey: She "was born premature due to the tragic loss of her mother," the account says. (A father of seven died last week while bringing his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their eighth child.)