Do you know who killed James Harris in 1983?
On December 4, 2012, the stillness of a rural stretch outside Nashville, North Carolina—Nash County roads where people are used to quiet and distance and the comfort of familiarity—was broken in an instant. Deputies were called to a home in the 7300 block of Cedar Grove School Loop Road, and when they arrived, the scene turned from “response call” to something final and irreversible: **Leasa Harper Smith**, 41 years old, was found **inside the residence, fatally shot**.
The early reporting is stark in the way so many breaking stories are—short on context, heavy on the facts that can be confirmed in the first hours. Deputies believed the person who called law enforcement was **David Griffin Leonard**, identified in reporting as Smith’s boyfriend. WRAL described Leonard as being outside when deputies arrived. Inside, Smith was dead. Within that same frame of time—while lights were still flashing, while the neighborhood was still trying to understand why police cars were there—Leonard was taken into custody and charged with **first-degree murder**, and he was held **without bond**. Authorities did not release a motive. The public was left with that sudden, jagged outline: a call for help, a woman found dead, an arrest made at the home.
Another layer of public reporting—victim-advocacy tracking—echoes the basic structure of what the news reported: a homicide in Nashville a **firearm** involved, and Leonard named as the alleged perpetrator, described as Smith’s boyfriend. It’s the kind of entry that is both necessary and brutal in its simplicity: a person’s entire life reduced to a date, an age, a weapon, and the relationship to the person accused.
But that is not the whole of who Leasa was—only the moment when the world learned her name under the harshest possible circumstances.
Her obituary, preserved in the quieter space where families try to speak more truthfully than headlines ever can, restores the parts of her that crime-scene reporting can’t hold. It records her as **Leasa Renee Smith**, born in Nash County on **August 16, 1971**, a woman remembered as **exceptionally creative**, someone who loved **drawing**, **writing poems**, and **knitting**—the kinds of intimate, patient arts that say something about how a person moved through the world. There’s tenderness in those details because they are so ordinary and so human: pencil lines on paper, words arranged into meaning, yarn turned into something warm enough to be given away.
That’s the part that lingers when you step back from the chronology. A death like this doesn’t just end a life; it interrupts a life in motion—projects half-finished, routines still mapped onto the week, relationships still unfolding. Someone who writes poems leaves behind not just a notebook, but a way of seeing. Someone who knits leaves behind items that keep their shape long after the hands that made them are gone. Someone who draws has likely left sketches in margins, little proofs of attention: the quiet habit of noticing. Those are the pieces families hold onto because they’re real in a way a news item can never be.
In the immediate aftermath, the publicly accessible accounts focus on the arrest and the initial charge. Leonard was charged with first-degree murder and held without bond, with initial court activity anticipated in the days that followed. But in what becomes a painful twist to the timeline, public obituary records show that **David Griffin Leonard died on January 9, 2013**—only weeks after Smith’s death. Those same sources do not document a trial outcome in connection with the charge. The story, at least as it appears in readily available public reporting, seems to stop short of the courtroom ending people expect when a charge as serious as first-degree murder is filed.
So what remains is a case remembered in fragments: the rural road, the deputies arriving, the house that became a crime scene, the absence of a publicly stated motive, and the grief that can be felt even through the most minimal reporting. And then the fuller, truer remembrance: a 41-year-old woman rooted in her North Carolina community, creative and expressive, someone whose life had texture—art and language and handmade work—before it had tragedy attached to her name.
When people read stories like this years later, there’s a temptation to search for neat conclusions: the reason why, the final court disposition, the clean arc from event to verdict. But sometimes the public record doesn’t give that closure, and what you’re left with is the human fact at the center: **Leasa Harper Smith died from a gunshot wound on December 4, 2012**, and the people who loved her were forced to carry what happened into every day afterward. The obituary stands as a kind of rebuttal to the violence—insisting that she was not merely a case, not merely a headline, but a person with gifts and interests and a creative inner life that mattered.
