A 28-year-old Little Rock man implicated in the slayings of two men six months apart in 2018 has accepted a 45-year prison sentence for the killings.
Sentencing papers filed on Wednesday in Pulaski County Circuit Court show Darrius Davon Holmes, known as Peanut, has pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the April 2018 death of Joshua Backus and the October 2018 slaying of Levon Sales.
Backus, 39, was found fatally wounded at a car-detail shop at 5301 Geyer Springs Road about three weeks after he had accused Holmes and another man of burglarizing Backus’ South Tyler Street home, a break-in that detectives learned stemmed from money the men said Backus owed them.
Over the next three months, detectives were able to track down the man who drove Holmes to the detail shop and another man who had been with them when Holmes was getting a gun to shoot Backus. They also interviewed a woman who had called Holmes and told him about Backus being at the detail shop and another woman who had seen Holmes in the area, police reports state.
Holmes was arrested in July 2018 but records aren’t clear when he posted bail. He would not be arrested again until April 2019 when he was charged with Sales’ killing.
Sales was shot to death in October 2018 at the Oak Ridge Apartments, 6201 Mabelvale Cutoff. A tip that someone known as JR, Junior or Kidd Indo was the last person to see Sales alive led detectives to a regular visitor to the apartments, Kenneth Earl Wilson Jr., 21, with further investigation causing them to look at Wilson’s sister, 27-year-old Jacquelyn Mashae Jones, an Oak Ridge tenant.
Informed she was a murder suspect, Jones told police that she and her brother and another man and woman had been together at the apartments the night Sales was killed. She said her brother had gotten into a fight with someone at the apartments then gunshots broke out around her, with Jones saying did not see who was shooting. She said she later learned that Sales had been killed and her brother told her he and Sales had been fighting over a gun, police reports show.
Wilson, in turn, told police after being informed he was a murder suspect that Holmes had been with him and his sister that night and it was Holmes who shot Sales after Sales had approached them asking for a light for his cigarette, according to police reports In a subsequent interview, after learning detectives had found a witness who raised doubts about his version of events, Wilson said he’d tried to pull a gun on Sales to scare him to get even for a humiliating viral video that Sales had circulated on the Internet showing Sales slapping him. Wilson said he’d lured Sales up close but when he went for the gun, Sales grabbed for the weapon. During the scuffle, Holmes shot Sales, Wilson told police, stating that he had not intended for Sales to be killed.