A North Little Rock woman who killed a man who was trying to rescue a friend was formally sentenced to 60 years in prison Tuesday.
Alundra Shelay Hampton, 26, was sentenced for second-degree murder, reduced from capital murder, and first-degree battery by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims.
Hampton shot both Mitchell Hines and customer Harvel Todd Sieber at Hines' detail shop on East Capitol Avenue in Little Rock during a November 2016 stick-up attempt.
Hines was shot in the leg. Sieber, a 47-year-old married father of one, was fatally wounded after pulling his own gun to try to rescue Hines.
Hampton was the first to plead guilty but the last to be sentenced because of her arrangement to cooperate with prosecutors against her co-defendants, Corey Williams Jr., 20, and Taelon Johnson, 22.
Johnson, who provided the gun Hampton used, was sentenced to 50 years in prison last month for second-degree murder, reduced from capital murder, first-degree battery and aggravated robbery. Williams, who came up with the idea of robbing Hines, pleaded guilty to those charges in August and was sentenced to 55 years.
Police said Hines and an employee, Jermaine Reynolds, had been working on Sieber's Volkswagen when they saw a blue Chevrolet sedan circling the parking lot several times.
A few minutes later, a man walked up, asked Hines some questions about getting his girlfriend's car detailed and then walked away.
Reynolds told police the man, later identified as Johnson, had been in the blue Chevrolet.
Sieber drove up a few minutes later and was standing in the parking lot when a heavy-set woman "described ... as looking more like a man than a woman" walked up and asked to use the restroom.
But before Reynolds could show her where it was, the woman pulled out a gun, police said.
Hines said he knocked the weapon out of her hands, but she picked it up and started shooting and running.
Hines said he also ran before realizing both he and Sieber had been shot. Police said Sieber was killed trying to return fire.
During his police interview, Hines said he'd recently befriended Williams as part of his Christian ministry after the younger man had run afoul of the law.
Hines said he'd given Williams, an acquaintance of Reynolds, a job but eventually had to fire him for poor performance and behavior at work. Hines said Williams was mad at him, believing that Hines still owed him wages.
Williams, on his own, went to detectives later on the day of the shooting to say he'd heard his name had come up in the investigation but that he'd had nothing to do with it.
But police continued hearing that Hampton and Williams were responsible. Reynolds' girlfriend, Chanay Nicole Johnson, also told police that Williams had told her that Hines owed him money.
Police weren't able to question Williams' girlfriend, Renada Smith, until about four months after the slaying.
She told detectives that Williams was mad at Hines and that the day of the killing, he told her about the robbery attempt and shooting.
She said Williams told her that he had done something bad and described the robbery attempt. Williams said that Hampton "had been dumb and just started shooting" and that "they did not even get anything." Williams told Smith that he had been lying down in the blue Chevrolet so neither Reynolds nor Hines could see him.
Metro on 02/13/2019