The older of two brothers accused of killing a 24-year-old woman and her children -- arrested with blood from the slayings on his shoes -- will face the death penalty at trial, Pulaski County prosecutors said Tuesday.
The case marks the first time in a decade that Little Rock authorities have sought execution.
Mariah Cunningham, 5-year-old Alaylah Fisher and 4-year-old Elijah Fisher were stabbed to death in their home at Rosewood Apartments on Lancaster Road about three weeks before Christmas 2017.
Cunningham's grandmother found the bodies in the blood-spattered apartment after the children did not go to school and Cunningham could not be reached by phone. Police also reported finding bleach smeared on the bodies, and a steak knife believed used in the killings was discovered in the bathtub.
Michael Collins, 26, of Colorado and William Burnell Alexander, 22, of Little Rock have been charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery in the family's deaths.
In July, the brothers were also charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery in the shooting death of 64-year-old Billie Thornton. The charges came a year after Thornton was found dead in his home at the Spring Valley Apartments on Interstate 30, a death investigators first thought was a suicide.
The brothers will stand trial separately, raising the possibility that there will be four trials, two for each set of victims.
Chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson told Circuit Judge Herb Wright on Tuesday that prosecutors would be asking for lethal injection for Collins but not for his brother.
Collins' trial date will be set at the next hearing, May 28. Both the prosecution and defense attorneys Katherine Streett and Jeff Rosenzweig told Wright they need that time to organize their evidence and line up their witnesses. The judge said he wants to hold trial before September.
The last defendant sentenced to death in Pulaski County was Billy Thessing, now 49, in September 2004.
Mattie Basinger was stabbed six times and beaten in the head in February 2003 in her southwest Little Rock home. Thessing wrecked her car on the last day her family had seen her alive. Her remains were found six days later.
The month after Thessing was convicted, another Pulaski County jury rejected execution in favor of a life sentence for Hernando Traylor, now 41, who killed 26-year-old Bobby McGee during a drug-related robbery at McGee's Little Rock apartment. McGee's roommate survived being shot and stabbed during the holdup.
Pulaski County prosecutors have not pursued the death penalty since Abdulhakim Muhammad, the self-proclaimed Muslim jihadist from Memphis who ambushed a pair of soldiers in June 2009 at a Little Rock army recruiting center. Muhammad, born Carlos Bledsoe, wounded one person and killed 23-year-old Army Pvt. William Long.
Muhammad, now 33, avoided execution by pleading guilty mid-trial in July 2011 and accepting a life sentence.
Curtis Vance, the Marianna man who fatally beat TV anchor Ann Pressley, 26, in her own bed after raping her in October 2008, was convicted of capital murder at trial. Vance, now 38, was linked to Pressley's slaying by DNA collected from the Lee County rape of a schoolteacher, but a jury spared his life after hearing about how he had been abused and neglected in childhood.
Prosecutors have pursued execution in other cases, but waived the death penalty after consulting with the victims' families.
Real estate agent Beverly Carter, a married mother of three raising her 11-year-old granddaughter, was kidnapped, suffocated and buried in a hole by Arron Lewis, who was pretending to be a potential client in September 2014. He was sentenced to life in prison at trial. Prosecutors did not seek execution at the request of Carter's family.
Willis McClinton Tucker, now 43, killed former girlfriend Shymeccah LaTonya Williams in October 2011 by beating the 34-year-old mother of two and stabbing her in the eye, but prosecutors agreed to a 60-year prison sentence at the request of the Williams family. Williams' mother said she did not want to put Tucker's mother through the same ordeal she had been through. He can apply for parole in November 2050.
Brandon Dewayne Johnson shot four men, killing three of them, in a series of armed robberies in Little Rock over a five-week span between December 2008 and January 2009, but pleaded guilty in July 2010 to first-degree murder, aggravated robbery, theft and first-degree battery in exchange for a 100-year prison sentence that requires him to serve at least 55½ years in prison.
Johnson's victims were University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences associate professor Joseph Bittengle, 50, who was fatally shot in front of his mother, whose purse was stolen by a robber who had just shot and wounded another man a few minutes earlier in December 2008. Johnson fatally wounded Akshaya Nandam, 26, and Eric German, 24, four miles and three hours apart in January 2009.
Antonio Demond Finney had fascination with the number 28 that led him to follow Frances Ann "Franny" Kelly, 50, of Mabelvale to her father's Little Rock home to rob her in November 2007. He tied her up and shot her seven times.
Finney, who had recently been paroled on an armed robbery conviction, had seen the number on her license plate. After two years of proceedings, mostly to determine whether Finney, now 42, was mentally competent, prosecutors agreed to a 50-year, no-parole sentence at the request of Kelly's father, who was worn down by the amount of time the case was taking to go to trial.
Metro on 04/03/2019