Deshaun Malik Rushing, one of two suspects in the November 2016 slaying of a Little Rock toddler, was fingerprinted at court order on Thursday as police work to link him to an armed attack on a 62-year-old Little Rock man that occurred about a week before the girl was killed.
Rushing, 22, and Larry James Jackson, 17, are each charged with capital murder and unlawful discharge of a firearm over the slaying of 2-year-old Ramiya Reed. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences for the pair.
Rushing is scheduled to stand trial in May, while proceedings against Jackson are on hold while his lawyer appeals Circuit Judge Barry Sims' December order that the teen stand trial as an adult.
The girl was killed two days before Thanksgiving 2016 by someone in a car firing into the vehicle she was riding in on South Harrison Street with her mother and cousins.
Police say the shooting was the most public display of a longtime feud between street gangs, the Monroe Street Hustlers and the Murder Mafia, that continues to this day.
Rushing and Jackson, who police say are Monroe Street members, were arrested six months later, after the girl's mother, Rokiya Williams, identified them as the gunmen she saw in the other car. Two of the girl's cousins belong to Murder Mafia, according to police.
Thursday, Sims ordered Rushing to submit to fingerprinting at a scheduled court hearing. The prints were collected in an office behind the judge's courtroom
Chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson had asked for the order. Police needed the fresh prints to confirm that a fingerprint taken from a cellphone found at the scene of the shooting that occurred a week before Ramiya's slaying belongs to Rushing, he said. Police already have established a tentative match.
No one was injured in the Nov. 15, 2016, gunfire at West 16th and South Tyler streets, although a house and three cars were struck by bullets. No one has been charged, but the case remains under investigation.
Detectives have learned that shell casings from that shooting match casings collected from the scene of Ramiya's slaying, according to Johnson. The location of the earlier shooting is less than a half-mile from where the girl was killed.
According to a police report, Willie Chism told police he'd just left a Tyler Street home and was driving east on 16th Street when two men jumped out of a white Ford sport utility vehicle that was in traffic ahead of him and started shooting at him.
Chism told officers he put his 1999 Lincoln Town Car into reverse to get away but quickly ran off the road and crashed into a retaining wall in the 1500 block of South Tyler Street. He said he ran from the car and didn't get a good look at the attackers.
A home and two cars at at 1600 South Harrison St. were also hit by bullets, the report states.
Metro on 01/12/2018