Verdict is guilty in Little Rock street shooting

A little more than 21 years ago, Korey Leavy and Izishill LaShawn Porch held their New Year's baby in their arms and dreamed of keeping him safe from street violence and drugs, according to news accounts.

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Darius Porch was born 50 seconds after midnight, after eight hours of labor by a 17-year-old Leavy, to be the first baby born in Little Rock in 1996. He came into the world three weeks early with a full head of hair.

Leavy and Porch, then 19, showed off their sleeping 5-pound, 13-ounce boy for news cameras and looked forward to a life together. But it didn't work out that way.

On Friday, Porch, 40, was sentenced to nine years in prison for shooting Leavy's 39-year-old boyfriend, David Williams, in the leg on North Bowman Road around noon last July 4.

Porch and Williams' Independence Day confrontation began with Darius Porch's attempt to figure out who got one of his T-shirts dirty. That turned into an argument between the younger Porch, now 21, and Williams.

What happened next is a matter of dispute.

Prosecutors said a raging Izishill Porch tracked down and shot Williams despite Williams' desperate, multiple attempts to get away from him after an initial confrontation at the WestRidge Place Apartments, 420 Napa Valley Drive, where Leavy and Williams were living.

Police, responding to calls about a shooting, found Williams at the Outback Steakhouse on Markham Park Drive, where he'd gone to hide from his assailant.

Defense attorneys Bobby Digby and John Landis said Williams was the angry and threatening one and that Porch had been trying to protect his sons from Williams, who had already threatened the life of his oldest son, Darius.

Williams told jurors that he never got along with Darius Porch or his younger brother, JaQuan, but that he had not threatened either of them that day. He said that, weeks earlier he had threatened to call his nephews to deal with Darius Porch during an argument but that he never really intended to follow through.

Alerted to the argument, Izishill Porch arrived at the apartments, and he and his two sons got into a heated confrontation with Williams.

Williams left the apartments in an effort to escape the elder Porch, prosecutors told the jury.

Porch told jurors that he never fired a gun and that Williams must have accidentally shot himself in the leg while they grappled on Bowman after the initial confrontation.

The first-degree battery charge against Porch carries a five-year minimum sentence, and the eight women and four men on the jury could have sent him up for 55 years.

The charge typically carries a 35-year maximum sentence when a gun is involved, but the married father of six faced an extended sentence since he is a repeat offender with 10 felony convictions, almost all involving drugs.

This will be the third time he's been sent to prison.

It took jurors 55 minutes to find Porch guilty as charged. Deciding a punishment took about 40 minutes. He'll have to serve a little more than two years in prison before he's eligible for parole, but the time he's spent in custody awaiting trial could cut that wait by about a year.

Jurors heard two versions of what led to Williams being shot in the left leg.

Porch and his wife, Bionica Adams, testified that Williams flagged them down on Bowman after the confrontation at the apartments, then started to pull out a pistol when Porch got out of his SUV to talk to him.

Adams said she ducked down on the floorboard when Williams made his move, so she didn't see what happened next. She said she heard a gunshot. Porch then got back in the car and they went home, she said.

Porch, who weighs about 300 pounds, said he stopped to see what Williams wanted, figuring either that Williams wanted to talk about the earlier argument or was about to go back to the apartment where Porch's children were.

Porch told jurors he was never in the street and never had a gun in his hand.

He said he was surprised when a gun went off during their brief struggle. He left immediately after the shot was fired and had no idea that Williams had been shot in the leg, he told jurors.

"He's reaching to pull a weapon," he said. "I grabbed his forearms, we tussled four or five seconds, a shot went off, and we went our separate ways."

Deputy prosecutor Matt Stauffer, cross-examining Porch, noted that his version of events was very convenient for him.

"The only way in this situation you don't do anything wrong is if you didn't touch a gun, possess a gun and you grabbed him and he shot himself in the leg," the prosecutor said.

Digby asked jurors to give Porch "a chance to be a good father and raise his kids."

Stauffer asked jurors to focus on Porch and what he'd done.

"He didn't just shoot him. He chased him down," the prosecutor said. "He hunted him down with a gun in his hand."

He asked jurors to consider what kind of example Porch was setting for his children that day.

"He wasn't an example for anybody," Stauffer said. "You can't be a good example some of the time. You have to be a good example all of the time."

Two witnesses who heard the gunshot called police.

Ryan Ashcraft of Benton was closing down his Bash Burgers restaurant at 315 N. Bowman Road when he and his wife were startled by the sound of a gunshot nearby. For an instant, Ashcraft, who now lives in Colorado, thought a car had run into a building.

"My wife screamed, 'Oh my God,' and I looked and I saw a man pointing a gun at a man who was running away," he told jurors.

A heavyset man with shoulder-length hair was standing almost in the middle of the road with a pistol raised in the direction of a smaller man who was fleeing, Ashcraft said.

The couple hid behind their car as the big man ran to a parked brown Buick sport utility vehicle. Ashcraft took a photo as it drove by and identified Porch as the man behind the wheel, who locked eyes with him.

"I looked at the shooter, and he looked at me," Ashcraft said.

William Montgomery, the other witness, told jurors he was driving south on Bowman and also saw a big man with shoulder-length dreadlocks holding a gun in the middle of the street.

"He had his hand out, and I heard fire," Montgomery told jurors. "After the fire took place, he jumped into a vehicle."

The funeral director said he followed, trying to get the license plate, but the SUV eluded him.

Leavy did not attend Friday's proceedings, and a working phone number could not be found for her.

But she and Porch were not able to protect their children as they had hoped to do when Darius Porch was born.

About 18 months after their first child was born, Leavy's sister, 28-year-old Tammy Williamson, was murdered in front of her at the family home on Fair Park Boulevard.

Leavy was pregnant with her second son, JaQuan, when Williamson was shot to death by Rodney Bernard Rutledge, who had been released from prison four days earlier.

Williamson had been trying to break things off with Rutledge, the father of her twins.

To get to Williamson, Rutledge clubbed Leavy with his gun, then pulled the struggling Williamson outside, shot her in the head and put her in the back of his car.

Police had to chase him down to arrest him. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison in March 2000.

Leavy's father was Calvin Leavy, a noted Arkansas blues musician who had a million-selling hit in 1970 with "Cummins Prison Farm" with his older brother, Hosea Leavy, also a renowned musician.

In 1992, Calvin Leavy was sentenced to life in prison under Arkansas' new "drug kingpin" law. Initially incarcerated at Cummins, he sang with the prison's singing group, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

In 2004, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee commuted Leavy's sentence to 75 years, according to the encyclopedia.

Leavy died at age 70 in June 2010 in Pine Bluff. Hosea Leavy died in California in 2008, when he was 80.

Metro on 05/06/2017

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