Patrick Hollingsworth Watkins, 22, a Black man, died late on November 21, 2015, after a birthday outing that was supposed to end with a quiet drive home. He was behind the wheel of a 2014 Nissan Sentra on Interstate 20 in Bossier Parish, heading east after leaving a casino in the Bossier City area, with his mother, Dora Blake, riding in the back seat and another woman seated up front.
Witnesses later described a sudden, frightening turn: the car veered off the interstate and crashed into a tree line near the 36-mile marker. In the chaotic moments after the impact, Blake climbed out and told people who stopped to help that she had been kidnapped and that she had shot the others in the vehicle. Investigators determined the story at the roadside didn’t match what happened inside the car. Watkins was found dead in the driver’s seat, shot in the head, and the front-seat passenger had been shot in the shoulder and taken to a Shreveport hospital with injuries described at the time as non-life-threatening.
Law enforcement arrested Blake, then 47, soon after the crash. Early reports said she was booked on first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder, with authorities noting she appeared highly intoxicated. As the case moved forward through the courts, prosecutors formally charged her with the killing under Louisiana’s second-degree murder statute and separately charged her with attempted second-degree murder for the surviving passenger.
The legal proceedings ended not with a trial, but with a negotiated plea. On May 23, 2017, Blake pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Watkins’s death; in return, the state agreed not to pursue habitual-offender sentencing and to dismiss the attempted-murder charge. A month later, on June 27, 2017, the judge imposed the maximum sentence for manslaughter: 40 years at hard labor. Blake appealed, arguing the punishment was excessive and pointing to intoxication and alcoholism, but on April 11, 2018, the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed both her conviction and the 40-year sentence.
