The North Little Rock man who died over the weekend after being shot at the Shorter Gardens housing project was a convicted child killer whose efforts to prevent prosecutors from retrying him on a capital-murder charge took him to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court rebuffed Alex Martin Blueford in May 2012, and in June 2013 he pleaded no contest in Pulaski County Circuit Court to first-degree murder, reduced from the original capital-murder charge, in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence for the November 2007 death of his girlfriend's 20-month-old son, nicknamed Fatman.
On Sunday, North Little Rock police charged Louis Thomas, 70, with first-degree murder after Blueford, a 38-year-old married father of two, died from gunshot wounds that day.
According to police reports, officers were called to the Blueford family apartment in the housing project on North Beech Street about 7:30 p.m. last Thursday.
Officer Gregory Blankenship reported finding the door to the apartment open with a heavily bleeding Blueford lying on the couch being attended to by his wife, who was holding their daughter.
Gabriel Lashay Blueford, 19, told Blankenship that Thomas, her grandfather, had shot her husband, Blankenship reported. The report does not say why Alex Blueford was shot.
Blueford was covered in blood and had two gunshot wounds, one in his left leg and the other that went through his left shoulder, Blankenship reported, stating that Blueford was able to speak and answer questions from police about his injuries.
Blankenship also described finding a broken glass table next to the injured man and seeing a "large amount" of blood in the kitchen and dining room.
Thomas surrendered to authorities on a first-degree battery charge the next day and has been jailed since. Police changed the charge to murder after Blueford died Sunday. Formal charges have not been filed.
In November 2007, Blueford was 26 and living in Little Rock with 20-year-old girlfriend Kimberly Tolbert, her 20-month-old son Matthew Jermaine McFadden Jr., and another woman.
Blueford, who had previous convictions for property crimes, was also a father, with a 4-year-old daughter by one woman and an infant son by another woman. That child had died of natural causes about 16 months earlier.
Five days after Thanksgiving in 2007, a mid-morning 911 call about the toddler not breathing sent an ambulance to the couple's home, which launched an investigation by Little Rock police. Blueford performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the boy until the ambulance arrived,then carried him out to meet paramedics.
The couple's roommate, Stacy Clay, told police that she had seen the boy bouncing on the bed and that she heard Blueford tell him to stop at least twice. A short while later, Clay said, she saw the boy lying on the bed. A little bit after that, Blueford took Matthew out of the room unconscious, and Clay could not get him to wake up or open his eyes, which prompted her 911 call, she told police.
The resulting police investigation determined that Tolbert was not at home when the child was injured, having left the residence at least 45 minutes before the call for help.
Doctors at Arkansas Children's Hospital determined that the boy had suffered a closed head injury and performed surgery to relieve pressure from his swelling brain, but Matthew died about 38 hours later.
An autopsy found no sign of previous abuse but showed he had three bruises under the scalp with brain bleeds, usually associated with traumatic brain injury, mostly on the right side of his head, and fluid had built up on his brain from the fatal injury.
With the medical findings that such an injury would either immediately knock a child out or at least render him too lethargic to move around much, suspicion fell on Blueford, who was caring for the boy while his mother worked and who regularly baby-sat Matthew when she was gone.
Blueford told police that the boy had been playing, jumping on the bed, but then grabbed his blanket and lay down. Concerned because of the death of his son, Blueford said, he had checked on the boy at least twice when he found Matthew not breathing. He said he could hear the baby's heart beating but could not get the boy to respond to him, even after Clay slapped the boy's face.
Blueford told police that the boy never fell while he was playing and said he never laid a rough hand on the child that day.
The police investigation led to a capital-murder warrant for Blueford's arrest in May 2008. He promised to surrender but never did, leading to an unsuccessful manhunt. In June 2008, Blueford was arrested about 250 miles away in Tyler, Texas, after police who pulled him over on a traffic infraction learned he was wanted in Arkansas.
While in custody in Texas, Blueford told police that the day Matthew was injured, Tolbert had shoved her son into a chair in a fit of rage. A crying Blueford repeatedly denied having anything to do with the boy's injuries and death, telling Texas authorities that he had not told Little Rock police about what he'd seen because he didn't want to get her into trouble.
After he was returned to Little Rock, Blueford told detectives that he had elbowed the boy and knocked him down, causing the baby to struggle to breathe.
His August 2009 trial ended in mistrial after jurors, after about 4½ hours of deliberation, said they could not reach a unanimous verdict.
Blueford's lawyers, backed by medical experts, had argued the boy's death was an accident, stemming from injuries unintentionally inflicted by their client. The boy's injuries were subsequently compounded by medical mistakes made by the ambulance crew that rushed the boy to the hospital, they said.
Blueford told jurors that he'd repeatedly lied to police out of fear, including blaming the boy's mother, but that his guilty conscience over accidentally hitting the boy eventually prompted him to come clean about what happened.
Prosecutors, with experts of their own, compared Matthew's injuries to the kind that would have been inflicted if he'd been hit by a car or if someone had dropped him off a building.
But it was a remark made by the jury foreperson that launched Blueford's 33-month unsuccessful petition to both the Arkansas and U.S. Supreme Courts to try to block prosecutors from retrying him in the murder case.
After three hours of deliberations, the woman said the 12-person jury had agreed to reject a murder charge for Blueford but had deadlocked 9-3 over a manslaughter conviction. After another 90 minutes, she reported that jurors believed they would never agree on a verdict, forcing the judge to call a mistrial.
The essence of Blueford's appeal was his claim that the foreperson's statement about jurors rejecting a murder conviction was sufficient to invoke his constitutional protections against double jeopardy and that prosecutors should not be able to try him again on the original capital-murder charge.
Arkansas justices rejected that argument in a unanimous decision in January 2011. The federal high court's nine justices split 6-3 in their May 2012 decision rebuffing Blueford's appeal.
Required to serve at least 70% of his 10-year sentence, the minimum punishment, Blueford was first eligible for parole in June 2015. The Parole Board approved his release in December 2016, records show.
He married his wife, the former Gabriel Thomas, in May 2018. His murder sentence expired in June 2018, given the credit he accrued for the nearly five years he spent in jail before his no-contest plea.
Metro on 09/19/2019