Vashiloh Willis, a 33-year-old Black man, was killed in the dark hours before dawn on September 14, 2020, in west Shreveport, Louisiana. Just before 5:00 a.m., police were called to the Economy Inn at 5101 Westwood Park Drive after reports of gunfire. When officers arrived, they found Willis suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. He was rushed to Ochsner LSU Health Hospital, but the injuries were too severe, and he later died.
In the days that followed, investigators worked the case through witness interviews and evidence gathered from the scene. As the story circulated locally, the setting sharpened into focus: a motel parking lot and the tense, uncertain window of early morning when few people are watching closely, and even fewer want to be the one who steps forward. The shooting left a trail of questions—who was there, what set it off, and who decided Willis would not leave that place alive.
By the end of that week, investigators publicly identified two suspects. Arrest warrants were issued for Contril Snow and Waylin Blanks, with both wanted on second-degree murder allegations connected to Willis’s death. Snow was taken into custody on September 18, 2020, at a residence on Centenary Boulevard and was booked into the Shreveport City Jail on a second-degree murder charge; he was also booked on an outstanding warrant for domestic abuse battery. Blanks remained sought at that time under a second-degree murder warrant.
Later coverage indicated the case continued moving through the courts long after the initial shock of the killing faded from the headlines. Reporting years afterward described plea agreements in which Snow and Blanks entered guilty pleas to manslaughter, resolving the second-degree murder charges without a trial. The accounts describing those pleas tied the homicide to a hotel in the Monkhouse Drive corridor, a description often used locally for the same stretch of west Shreveport where the Economy Inn sits, and they portrayed the killing as one captured on video—an incident that investigators said helped cement the suspects’ identification early in the investigation.
Even with arrests made and charges filed, the story of that morning still reads like a sudden rupture: a man found bleeding in a motel lot before sunrise, a frantic transport to the hospital, and a death that turned an ordinary address into a crime scene. What followed—warrants, a capture, a manhunt, and eventually negotiated pleas—maps the long arc that often trails a single burst of violence, where the public first hears a name, then waits months and years to learn what the justice system finally decides to call it.
