In the early hours of January 16, 2015, Reginald Wess, a 50-year-old man, was shot multiple times at a home in Shreveport, Louisiana, after a dispute inside the house spilled into sudden violence. Police were called to the 100 block of South Greenbrook Loop just before 3:00 a.m., and found Wess under the carport with several gunshot wounds to his upper body. He was rushed to University Health, but he did not survive.
Behind that front door, the people in the home were tied together by something close to family: Wess was engaged to marry Mattie Efferson and had been living in the house with her and her sons for about four and a half years. His routine was steady—early to bed, up around 2:30 a.m. to get ready for work and tend to the dogs—until the morning the gunfire broke the quiet between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Awakened by the shots, Mattie Efferson stepped out and saw Wess in his work uniform on the floor near the doorway between the kitchen and the carport, while her son, McKinley Efferson, stood across the room holding her handgun. When she demanded to know what had happened, he told her Wess had been “messing with him.”
Investigators pieced the scene together quickly. Emergency services received two 911 calls—one from an unidentified male and another from Mattie Efferson—and officers searched the house with her consent. They later found the 9 mm handgun hidden under McKinley Efferson’s mattress, along with four spent 9 mm shell casings in his clothing hamper. Crime-scene staff documented the interior and the blood in the kitchen area as the case began to shift from frantic emergency response to homicide investigation.
The medical findings matched what the house revealed. The autopsy described five wounds, with multiple paths of injury and bullets recovered from Wess’s body; the pathologist testified that more than one of the wounds would have been fatal on its own. Toxicology testing was negative for drugs and alcohol. Ballistics linked the recovered projectiles and shell casings back to the same handgun—Mattie Efferson’s 9 mm—that the suspect had been seen holding moments after the shooting.
McKinley Efferson was taken into custody and initially charged with second degree murder, with early reporting describing an argument that ended with him pulling a pistol and firing repeatedly. The case ultimately went to a jury, which returned a verdict of manslaughter rather than second degree murder; Efferson was sentenced to 36 years of imprisonment at hard labor. He appealed, but the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed both the conviction and the sentence in a judgment rendered November 14, 2018, leaving the punishment in place and the killing legally resolved as a conviction rather than an open question of suspects.
