A 27-year-old North Little Rock woman was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for killing a liquor store clerk in a holdup that netted only a $25 bottle of whiskey.
Four days after the second anniversary of the deadly robbery, a Pulaski County jury deliberated about 75 minutes before convicting Shaniqua Monique Finley of capital murder and two counts of aggravated robbery. Finley did not testify.
While the eight women and four men concluded that Finley had robbed both clerks at Best Shot Liquor in August 2016, they acquitted her of shooting the second one, a 66-year-old woman who survived gunshots to the chest and arm at the store on MacArthur Drive in North Little Rock.
Jurors also found that Finley did not use a gun during the crime. If the jurors had ruled she used a gun, Circuit Judge Leon Johnson could have added up to 15 years to her prison time.
Jurors did not give an explanation for the conflicting decisions.
But, given the capital-murder conviction, which carries a mandatory life term, the findings don't affect her sentence.
The robber shot the only workers in the store, Niranjana Modi, the mother of store owner Guarang Modi, and Guarang Modi's father-in-law, 65-year-old Dilipkumar Patel, before fleeing with a half-gallon bottle of Evan Williams 1783 whiskey. Patel died 11 days later.
The resulting police investigation traced a distinctively colored car -- green with a "mustard" top -- to Finley's front door days later, and detectives discovered the murder weapon, a .25-caliber Raven pistol, in Finley's closet, prosecutors Leigh Patterson and Grayson Hinojosa said.
But perhaps most significantly, police found an almost empty half-gallon bottle of Evan Williams 1783.
"In her refrigerator in her apartment is this bottle. The gun ... is in her apartment where she is, where the bottle of liquor is that matches the brand taken from the liquor store," Hinojosa said.
That bottle was also marked to show when it had been bottled, he said.
"This bottle was laser-printed with a time stamp, and it was bottled at the exact same time as the [six] other bottles in Best Shot," he said. "The state got the whiskey ... the [bullet] casings, and the state got the gun used to shoot ... and to kill."
Defense attorney Fernando Padilla derided the case against his client as "a whole bag of nothing" that might have succeeded in discovering the gun used in the robbery but failed to show who used it.
"What the state has done is convict a gun, if you believe the [state Crime Laboratory] expert," Padilla said. "If she [the firearm examiner] has made a mistake, her [Finley's] entire life is on the line."
Prosecutors had no DNA or fingerprints to prove that Finley had ever been in the store, and most importantly, he told jurors in his closing remarks, the three people who saw the killer, including the surviving store clerk, could not identify Finley as the perpetrator. Each witness described the killer as taller and heavier than the 130-pound, 5-foot-2-inch Finley, he noted.
"Not one of those witnesses pointed at her and said, 'Oh my God, that's who did it,'" Padilla said. "They got the wrong person. They cannot prove my client had anything to do with this."
On Wednesday, surviving clerk Niranjana Modi told jurors that the late-afternoon encounter with the female killer started out with some innocuous conversation between herself, the woman and Patel. The woman had wanted to know what kind of mixer was good with peach vodka, Modi told jurors through an interpreter.
The woman put a bottle of Evan Williams on the counter, but pulled out a gun and opened fire when Modi asked to see her identification, Modi testified, speaking in her native Gujarati language from western India.
"I said I no selling without ID," Modi said. "Immediately she shot. I remember it was two or three bullets."
Modi, wounded in the chest and arm, dropped to the floor to hide under the counter while the wounded Patel, also hit in the chest, stumbled toward an office at the back of the store.
The robber fled, leaving behind the whiskey bottle she had carried to the counter. But she took with her a boxed bottle off the shelf and ran from the store. Modi said she screamed for help, but no one came. She said she was able to get to her feet and run from the store, bleeding and calling for help.
Perria Jaquard Ross, a barber who worked next door to the store, said he was on a smoke break talking on his cellphone when a woman running from the store and carrying something caught his eye. The 27-year-old Ross, one of the first to call 911, told jurors he next saw the bleeding Modi burst outside. Inside the store, Ross told jurors, he called 911 again after seeing someone trying to help the stricken Patel.
It was Dmmorryia Kerrier Swift's description of the green and yellow car that helped police trace the car to Finley. Swift, 40, who lives near the store, said she had never seen the vehicle in her neighborhood and thought the way the woman was driving it was suspicious.
As Swift watched, another woman, carrying something, ran from the liquor store and up to the parked car, which then drove away, she told jurors.
Police found the vehicle that same day at 4925 Augusta Circle, the apartment complex where Finley lived, and discovered that it was registered to Finley's girlfriend, Temeka Lynette Nelson, 37.
Detectives found the whiskey and gun during a search two days later. Court records show that Finley has told others that her girlfriend is responsible for the holdup.
Metro on 08/31/2018