PHOENIX — A Phoenix-area lawyer said Wednesday that he was on the phone with his wife when she was killed during a middle-of-the night encounter with an intruder at the family’s getaway and future retirement home in eastern Arizona.

State police named a 14-year-old boy as a suspect in the killing, and authorities were searching for him.

Ernest Collins Jr. said his wife, TerriLynne Collins, 54, was killed early Tuesday morning while struggling with the intruder.

She had been in the couple’s home and went to a trailer on the property in response to a text for help from the couple’s 18-year-old daughter.

Collins said that his wife called him before she went to the trailer and that he was able to hear much of what happened during the fatal encounter in Concho, a rural community about 160 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Collins, an attorney in Mesa, said he didn’t immediately understand what was going on when his wife called him after midnight and woke him from a deep sleep.

She was apparently walking to the trailer where their daughter and the daughter’s friend were staying at the time.

As he listened to his wife confront the intruder, ‘‘I finally realized that she had someone at gunpoint,’’ Collins said.

associated press