A 19-year-old North Little Rock man has accepted a 35-year prison sentence for killing a girl in Little Rock's Boyle Park last year.
Sentencing papers filed on Thursday show Ladarius Darnell Burnett, admitting to fatally shooting 10-year-old Ja'Aliyah Lene' Hughes, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, reduced from capital murder, in exchange for the 35-year sentence imposed by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson. Burnett will have to serve 24½ years before he can qualify for parole.
Burnett was one of two teenagers arrested in the shooting attack that also wounded the boyfriend of the girl's sister. His co-defendant, 19-year-old Eric Hall of Little Rock, is scheduled to go to trial on capital murder and first degree battery charges later this month.
Under the conditions of Burnett's plea agreement, negotiated by deputy prosecutor Jayme Butts-Hall and defense attorney Birc Morledge, a first-degree battery charge related to the shooting of 24-year-old Kejuan Clifton McGill of North Little Rock, was dropped.
According to police, Ja'Aliyah was enjoying a family party at the 250-acre park when she and McGill were shot when two men got out of a car and started shooting. McGill, who is Hall's cousin, appeared to be the actual target, according to an arrest affidavit.
Police were immediately able to identify Burnett as Ja'Aliyah's killer because her mother, Yuquita Bradley, recognized him and was able to show investigators Burnett's Facebook page while in the hospital emergency room. She told investigators that she and her family were at the park when she noticed a white car circling around the parking lot. Burnett, her older daughter's boyfriend, was in the front passenger seat but Bradley did not know the driver, she said.
Some kind of argument broke out between McGill and the driver, with Burnett joining in, Bradley told police. She said she could see the driver had a gun tucked into his pants.
Bradley said Burnett and the driver got back into the car, but then Burnett got out again with a gun in hand and started shooting, calling out that he was going to "air out" the area, which police say is slang for shooting. She said the crowd started running and she saw that her daughter and McGill had both been shot.
Bradley's older daughter, not identified in police reports, also described seeing Hall, whom she knew only as "Chop", arguing with McGill and then flashing a pistol. The girl told police she was facing away from the men, about to get into a car, when the gunfire started so she did not see the shooting, but said she knew both Hall and Burnett to regularly carry firearms.
She took cover in the vehicle while shots were fired then found her wounded sister after the firing stopped. She said McGill was shot as he was trying to get into the car with her.
McGill's girlfriend, Jazzmen Williams, told investigators that she saw the defendants, whom she knew only as "Chop" and "Ladarius," arguing with McGill. Williams said the encounter began with a confrontation between Burnett and McGill, describing for police how Burnett had gotten out of the car and walked up to McGill to argue with him.
Williams said she saw Hall pull out a gun and fire a round into the air, then point the weapon at McGill and shoot again. She described for police seeing Burnett firing from the passenger side of the car he and Hall arrived in, then run to the front of the vehicle and fire his gun some more.
Another witness, Nyanna Norris, placed Hall, whom she knew as "Chop," at the park although she said she never saw him with a gun. According to police, none of the witnesses reported seeing McGill with a weapon, and investigators found two different types of shell casings at the scene. Police reports do not reveal the dispute between the defendants and McGill.
When he was arrested in the murder case, Burnett was already being sought by police on suspicion of residential burglary. According to an arrest affidavit, investigators recognized Burnett on home security video showing a man breaking into the garage of a home at 6805 Dahlia St. in February 2021, about a week before the murder. That charge was later dropped.
When the girl was killed, Burnett was free on bond with an electronic ankle monitor and was awaiting trial on two counts of first-degree battery, charged with shooting two teenage acquaintances, Caleb Sykes and Gabrielle Wilson, at the Staybridge Suites hotel, 1020 S. University Drive, in Little Rock in November 2019. Arrested the day after the shootings, Burnett was found to be carrying a gun.
The charges were dropped after Sykes, 18, was killed in a May 2021 shootout between cars in the 5600 block of South University. No arrests have been made in that case.
Questioned by detectives, Burnett said that Sykes had been the first to shoot, opening fire during an argument with a friend of Burnett's, and it was Sykes who had shot Wilson, now 18, according to court records.
Burnett told police he fired back after Sykes had fired about three shots. Police reported collecting 17 shell casings in the suite.
Four months after the hotel incident, Little Rock police again came across Burnett while investigating the July 2020 shooting of a 12-year-old boy at the Residence Inn at 1400 S. Shackleford. The boy, sharing a bedroom with his parents as they traveled through Little Rock, was struck in the leg while sleeping.
No one has been charged in that shooting, but police reported collecting security video that shows Burnett with four older men at the hotel shooting guns, court filings show. The video shows the gunmen striking an area near where the boy and his family were staying.
According to Burnett's mother, testifying at a 2020 hearing, his personality changed when one of his brothers was killed in an unsolved Little Rock homicide when Burnett was 15
"It put a lot of fury in him," Kimberly Marie Burnett of North Little Rock said. "It hurt him mentally and made him ... paranoid to be around people. None of this [trouble] came about until my son passed."
Police found Burnett's brother, Lewis Charles Wallace III, 20, and another man, 19-year-old Stevie James Howard Jr., fatally wounded in March 2017 at Wallace's apartment in the the Spring Valley Apartments, 8701 Interstate 30.
Court records show that another of Burnett's brothers, 25-year-old Ocoriye Deonte Wallace, is serving a 30-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. Wallace pleaded guilty to the charge, reduced from capital murder, in June 2017 in Garland County Circuit Court for his role in the September 2015 slayings of Roy Smith and Elijah Crump in Hot Springs.