A man with a criminal past stretching back nearly a decade on Thursday made his first appearance in Pulaski County Circuit Court to answer charges of attempted capital murder and aggravated robbery over accusations that he shot a North Little Rock woman in the head four months ago and stole her wallet.
Emanuel Darrell Traylor's arraignment before Judge Herb Wright comes more than two years after prosecutors dropped two first-degree murder charges against the 36-year-old North Little Rock man when the only witness who could place Traylor at the scene of the slayings of Glenn James Jennings Jr., and Monte Allen Gilbert, 26, stopped cooperating with authorities and dropped out of sight.
The men were found fatally wounded in Gilbert's North Little Rock home in January 2017 in a killing that police believe was the result of a marijuana deal gone wrong. Traylor was arrested the next day. The charges were dropped in August 2018 after Traylor had spent 18 months in jail.
Traylor pleaded innocent Thursday to all charges, which included unrelated counts of illegal firearm possession, drug-trafficking and terroristic-threatening. He's due back in court for a bond hearing next month.
Traylor has been jailed since May 15 when he was arrested by North Little Rock police on an attempted-murder warrant about three weeks after Amani Maureen Baker, 24, was found bleeding heavily from a head wound outside the family's Schaer Street home, according to police reports.
Sasha Kathleen Moore, 46, told investigators that she'd just gotten home from work to find her front door open and her daughter disoriented and covered in blood on the front steps of a neighbor's home.
Moore said she'd just spoken to her daughter a few minutes earlier to tell her she was almost home. Moore said her daughter sounded fine and gave no indication that anything was wrong, according to the report.
That report further notes that Moore's call to her daughter could have been as recently as three minutes before Moore found her injured daughter.
Baker was unable to answer questions at the scene. She had a two-inch wound behind her left ear. Police tracked Baker's bloody footprints back into the house and into her bedroom, where investigators found bloody sheets on the bed and blood-soaked carpeting. In the kitchen, police found Baker's cellphone and a recently poured drink.
There were no signs of forced entry but the back door, which was typically locked, was found unlocked, according to the report.
MAN KNOWN AS VA
The reports don't say how long Baker was in the hospital after the April 22 shooting, but when she was released she told police that a man she knew as VA had shot her in the head. She gave detectives the man's phone number because he'd called her before going over to her house, according to the reports. Baker said her wallet and that of her mother were stolen from the home.
Detective Raul Dallas reported that he was able to link the VA phone number to Traylor, and Baker was able to identify him in a photo lineup as the man who shot her. Court records show that Traylor is known by authorities to go by the VA nickname.
Traylor also faces drug-dealing charges from his arrest, court findings show. North Little Rock police located him when officers were called to the Jefferson Manor apartments on John Ashley Drive by a former girlfriend who said someone, whom she believed to be Traylor, was shining a flashlight into the back window of her residence.
Police arrested Traylor after seeing him driving out of the apartment complex. Police noted that Traylor's 1999 black Ford Expedition smelled of marijuana, and a search of the vehicle turned up a small amount of the drug, but also methamphetamine and crack cocaine, an arrest report said.
Traylor also faces a felony firearm charge stemming from an arrest in Little Rock about two weeks earlier, also driving the Expedition. According to an arrest report, Little Rock officers stopped Traylor on West Eighth Street on May 2 after seeing fake license plates on the SUV.
OFFICER INJURED
Traylor "jumped" out of the vehicle, according to the arrest report, which describes him as acting erratically. Officers searched him and seated him in the back of a patrol car, then saw a pistol butt jutting from between the SUV's driver's seat and the center console. When police got him out of the patrol car to ask him about the gun, Traylor ran off and made it about a block away before he was tackled, the report says. One of the officers, Christian Heustis, was injured trying to catch Traylor, the report states.
Traylor also faces a felony terroristic-threatening charge based on accusations that he made threatening phone calls to his fiancee last November, while he was on probation for assaulting her.
Traylor had been placed on three years' probation about two months before the reported threats after pleading guilty to felony terroristic threatening and misdemeanor domestic battering in September 2019, charges that stemmed from his December 2018 arrest for an attack on Shawnda Cecile Jackson, 44, at the couple's Powerline Road home. He had been released from jail on the murder charges about 4½ months earlier.
Prosecutors dropped more serious charges of kidnapping and aggravated assault on a family member in exchange for Traylor's guilty plea.
Court files show Jackson had written to the court, describing the charges as "all blown out of proportion," complaining that prosecutors had manipulated her and stating that she had been the instigator of the altercation, court filings show.
"It is my wish and request that all charges be dropped as this entire case is just blown out of proportion," Jackson wrote. "Mr. Traylor and I are engaged to be married. Please drop all charges so he may come home to his family because me and the kids need him to be home."
Court records show Traylor, who has a conviction for residential burglary out of Phillips County, has been on probation in Pulaski County since December 2011 after pleading guilty to robbery and misdemeanor domestic battering after a September 2011 arrest. He had beaten his then-girlfriend, 36-year-old Erica Williams, and stolen her purse in Little Rock, court filings show.
Authorities had no forensic evidence to tie Traylor to the Jennings-Gilbert slayings in 2017, according to police testimony and court records. Jennings was found fatally wounded in his bed with a gunshot wound through the top of his head. He died on the way to the hospital.
Gilbert was dead on the floor nearby in the bedroom, his body sprawled across the doorway leading outside. He'd been shot in the face, with the bullet exiting through his neck.
Jennings' sister was the person who called police. She had been in the house when the men were shot but saw the gunman only from the back and could not identify him.
ABANDONED VEHICLE
Authorities reported developing a circumstantial case against Traylor that began with the accidental discovery by police of an abandoned white Mercury Mountaineer a block from the crime scene about the same time the shooting was reported. The Mountaineer belonged to a girlfriend of Traylor's whom he had lived with previously, according to reports.
Tying Traylor to the killings was a police interview with a friend of Taylor's the night of the killing, reports said. Robert Daniel Jackson, 27, told investigators that he'd ridden with Traylor in a white Mercury Mountaineer to a home where Traylor planned to purchase marijuana, according to the reports.
Jackson told authorities that he stayed in the SUV while Traylor went inside the home. The sound of gunfire inside the house drew his attention, and he saw Traylor shooting at two men, he told authorities.
He told police that he was alarmed by what he saw, so he moved into the driver's seat of the Mountaineer and drove off, abandoning the vehicle about a block away on Frank Street, which is where police discovered it that night.
Inside the Mountaineer, police reported finding a cellphone linked to Traylor and a pistol, although not the one used in the killings.
Traylor had come to the attention of detectives that night because he called to report that the Mountaineer had been stolen and had gone to the police station to file a report.
While talking to Traylor about how the SUV came to be stolen, detectives said they began to suspect that he was involved in the killings, but when the questioning turned to that topic Traylor invoked his right to a lawyer and stopped talking. He was then arrested.
When the charges were dropped because Jackson disappeared, prosecutors told the judge that they had not been able to find Jackson despite months of searching. The trial had already been delayed once because Jackson could not be found.
Court records indicate that authorities located Jackson in March and learned that he now lives in Genevieve County, Mo.