A 35-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia is fit to stand trial, a judge ruled Friday, almost five years after the man was accused of killing a pregnant Little Rock woman and her unborn child.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson pronounced Mark Pierre Bonner competent after hearing from both prosecution and defense psychologists who had examined him. The judge scheduled his trial for Nov. 14.
Bonner has undergone six mental evaluations and repeated commitments to the State Hospital since his 2012 arrest.
State doctors deemed him fit for the first time in May 2013 then again in January 2016. He has had a difficult time staying on a regular medication schedule in jail, so prosecutor Scott Duncan and defense attorney Cheryl Barnard have arranged for him to stay in the State Hospital until trial.
Bonner was arrested on two counts of first-degree murder in July 2012, two days after 25-year-old Alexis Esaw Khabeer was found dead in her grandmother's Hutsell Road home.
Bonner told police he choked and beat Khabeer the day she died after she'd ordered him out of the house during an argument, court records show. He said he'd been in Little Rock about a month and had known Khabeer about a week when she'd let him move into the 1,866-square-foot home, which did not have electricity.
Bonner has since recanted his statement, telling doctors that he didn't know the woman and that he only admitted to killing her because police told him he would get the death penalty if he didn't cooperate.
Khabeer, a married mother of a then-3-year-old son, was also troubled. She had been committed in 2007 after being diagnosed mentally ill. Her family said she'd left her husband of two years a couple of months before her death.
Khabeer had lived on and off at the residence just off Geyer Springs Road since she was 7. She and her husband had reported living there when they were married in May 2010.
Five months before she was killed, Khabeer was placed on five years of probation for burglarizing the house in July 2011 and stealing cigarettes and a lighter. Her sentence required her to undergo drug treatment.
Her body was found by a friend who went to check on her because she had not been responding to text messages. Khabeer was 13 weeks pregnant. Authorities have not said who the child's father was.
Police began looking for Bonner after neighbors, friends and family reported that a man -- known as Mark to some, as Black Jesus to others -- had been seen at the house with her before.
Detectives found Bonner, wearing blood-stained clothing, behind a Taco Bell on Geyer Springs Road, an area he was known to frequent.
On the night of his arrest, Bonner said that after Khabeer told him to leave, he'd asked her for a hug. But she shoved him and took a swing at him. He said he punched her in the face and started choking her, court filings show.
"After I hit her, I choked her," Bonner is reported as saying. "My mind was ... I was like in a totally different space. It was just like ... look what I done. She was still moving, and that's just as bad as murder. And push came to shove and I just hit her like once or twice with a stick. I figured that would just get her out of the way."
According to the filings, Bonner told police he knew the woman was pregnant, but said the child was not his.
Metro on 06/24/2017