A man who killed a Boston Police officer in 1993 was arrested this morning for robbing a woman in North Providence, Rhode Island.
Joshua McCullough, 60, of Warwick, R.I., was until 2018 known as Terrell Muhammad, the man who shot and killed BPD Officer Thomas F. Rose on Feb. 19, 1993, while attempting an escape from the downtown police station.
McCullough petitioned to change his name on May 8, 2018, and the change was made on June 21, 2018, according to Suffolk County Probate Court records.
North Providence Police Chief Colonel Alfredo Ruggiero, Jr., confirmed that McCullough is the same two-time killer and career criminal.
Officers of the North Providence, Warwick and Rhode Island State and East Providence police departments arrested McCullough at 6 a.m. today at his home and charged him with first-degree robbery and felony assault.
Police say that McCullough approached a woman in the parking lot of the Citizens Bank in the 1000-block of Charles Street in North Providence Tuesday morning and punched her in the chest. He then grabbed her deposit bag filled with $12,665 and fled the scene in a silver JEEP Cherokee, police say.
MucCollough was once described by then-Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis as “a career criminal’s career criminal” and “the reason they invented the so-called ‘three strike’ law. Gelzinis concluded that he’s a killer and lifelong criminal who has “gotten far too many chances.”
On Feb. 19, 1993, McCullough was locked up in a holding cell at the BPD’s A-1 station downtown, often called the Government Center station. McCullough had been allowed to exit his cell to make a phone call, but would show other intentions when, police say, he lunged for Rose’s service pistol and the two wrestled for control.
McCullough squeezed off a few rounds, at least two of which struck Rose and would take his life. Rose, a BPD officer for 13 years and a U.S. Air Force veteran, was 42 at the time of his killing. He was a father to three, including Thomas Rose, Jr., who would himself join the BPD in 1998 and is currently a sergeant.
Then-Muhammad was sentenced to 26-to-30 years in prison for Rose’s killing, which the jury deemed manslaughter. He only served 15 years and was released in 2009.
The murder of Officer Rose wasn’t the first time McCullough killed somebody.
He was previously convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of Angela Skeete in 1986.
The Herald reported then that Skeete, originally from Barbados, and her husband, St. Clair Skeete, had opened Tracy’s Record Store in Dorchester’s Codman Square in February 1986. Just four months later, on May 27, 1986, McCullough or another man shot her in the face at point-blank range when she tried to stop them from stealing a stereo.
Police said then that Skeete had already handed over some money to the gunmen, but when she resisted their theft of the stereo, they responded with gunshots.
She held on for at three days, but would die from her injuries on May 30 in Boston City Hospital. She was 31, according to the death noticed published in the Herald. By November 1986, St. Clair Skeete was no longer able to make mortgage payments on the family’s home at 63 Homes St. in Dorchester and the bank foreclosed, according to a review of contemporary legal notices.
McCullough received a short sentence. Convicted for gunning down Skeete in cold blood, Muhammad received just a 6- to 10-year sentence in state prison, according to prior Herald reporting.
The time he served appears to be little deterrent from crime.
He was arrested again at the end of August 2010 for fleeing a traffic stop in Cranston, R.I. During the incident, the Herald wrote at the time, he then pointed his vehicle directly at police cruisers and for that got a charge of assault on a police officer.
“He keeps on re-offending,’’ Thomas Rose Jr., the son of murdered Officer Rose, said, according to Herald reports at the time. “Everybody who had something to do with the fact that he’s out now should be accountable for what he’s doing right now.’’
Muhammad had pleaded no contest just hours before that incident for stealing a large TV from the Veterans Canteen Service at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Providence in October 2009 and was given three years of probation.
