A Little Rock teenager has accepted a 10-year prison sentence for killing one teen in a shooting that prosecutors said was intended for another teen.
Cedric Demond West, 18, pleaded guilty Thursday to manslaughter, a Class C felony, and accepted the maximum 10-year sentence, court records show.
Under the plea agreement negotiated by West's attorneys, Bret Qualls and Lott Rolfe, the charge was reduced from capital murder, which carries a potential life sentence. Prosecutors also dropped an aggravated assault charge stemming from another instance of gunplay in which no one was hurt.
Cordaro Da'mon Houston, 18, of Little Rock was killed in September 2015 in the 1200 block of Fair Park Boulevard when shots were fired into the car in which he was riding with three other teenagers. Houston, who was a backseat passenger, was the only one shot. No one saw who fired the shots.
Authorities arrested West after receiving reports that he had been seen that same day driving a white police-style Ford Crown Victoria like the one driven by the killer.
West denied any involvement in the killing but told police he owned a car like that with a police spotlight.
West told police he hadn't registered the vehicle and hadn't driven it regularly because the brakes were bad. He said he'd been forced to use it to get to work the day after the shootings because he didn't have any other transportation.
Prosecutors believe that Corey Cornell Robinson Jr., the driver of the car Houston was in, was the real target and that Houston had been an innocent victim.
Robinson, then 17, told police that he'd seen West driving the car from which the fatal shots came.
Prosecutors said West had been involved in an earlier shooting that wounded another friend of Robinson's, and they wanted to use evidence from that shooting to argue that Houston's slaying was part of a longstanding feud between West and Robinson. Prosecutors said West had gone after other friends of Robinson's.
Defense attorneys persuaded Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright to reject the prosecution's request at a June hearing.
They argued that allowing prosecutors to use evidence of the March 2014 shooting of then-15-year-old Keshawn Kelly would do more to make West look bad than it would to prove that he was responsible for Houston's slaying.
The defense was also able to show that Robinson, who testified in June that he saw West shoot and wound Kelly, told police a different story in 2014. Robinson told detectives then that he had not seen the shooting but only heard the gunfire.
Robinson testified that he does not know why West would be out to get them, but that they had gotten into a fistfight at school around the time of the Kelly shooting and that West had challenged him to a fight just before the shooting.
Police reports show that Kelly initially denied that he'd been shot and that he did not tell authorities what had happened to him for two days.
When police heard that he might have been shot, Kelly first said the scratch across his stomach was from a dog. But a nurse who examined him said the wound was definitely from being grazed by a bullet.
Kelly subsequently told police that he'd been shot by West and his older brother.
Kelly said he'd had a "beef" with West for about three months and that he'd beaten West in a January 2014 fistfight, court records show.
West and his older brother pleaded guilty to first-degree battery and aggravated assault for the Kelly shooting and were on probation when Houston was killed.
The case that was dropped Thursday by prosecutors was an aggravated assault count based on accusations that West had shot at then-16-year-old Tremayne Beasley Jr. about a month before Houston was killed.
Beasley was not injured and his car was not struck, according to police reports.
Beasley said he was driving an olive Jeep when he stopped at the intersection of 17th and Abigail streets on Aug. 25, 2015. West, driving a white Ford Crown Victoria, also stopped at the intersection, got out of the car and fired three rounds at him, he told police.
When officers arrived, they chased West on foot through an empty house at 1816 Abigail St., where police found a gun in a trash can and arrested him in the backyard, according to police reports.
Witnesses said there had been a second person in West's car, Kaylon Robinson, but police did not find him in the area.
In September 2015, about two weeks before Houston was killed, police made a public appeal for help in finding West and his brother Cleveland West, 19, so they could be questioned about another homicide.
The brothers met with detectives and were released without charges. Police didn't release any details about that killing or what the brothers could know about it.
Cleveland West was arrested May 30 over accusations that he was responsible for a May 6 drive-by shooting in Little Rock that police say targeted Anthony Harris and Amaya Brown.
The older West is awaiting a January trial on charges of aggravated assault, unlawful discharge of a firearm and felon in possession of a firearm.
Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available. Court records show he was released from jail on $100,000 bond five days after his arrest.
Metro on 11/05/2016