Frank Lloyd, a 55-year-old man, was shot on the afternoon of December 30, 2022, in the Sweet Home community of Pulaski County, Arkansas, after what investigators described as a confrontation with a neighbor. Deputies from the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office were called to the 3500 block of Tony Road, a semi-rural stretch a few miles south of Little Rock, around 2 p.m. in response to reports of gunfire. They arrived to find Lloyd suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, gravely injured but still conscious enough to speak with the first deputy who knelt beside him.
According to the incident reports later summarized in local news coverage, the deputy asked the wounded man who had shot him. Lloyd answered with a single name — “Makil” — and went on to tell the deputy that the shooter, whom he identified as Makel or Makil Lowery, lived in a gray trailer along Tony Road and had used a gray-colored firearm.
A subsequent report noted that Lloyd appeared to have three gunshot wounds when deputies first reached him. Emergency medical personnel transported him to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, but he did not survive his injuries. The sheriff’s office soon announced that the shooting victim had died and that the case was now being handled as a homicide, asking anyone with information to contact investigators as they worked to piece together what had happened in the quiet Sweet Home neighborhood that day.
As detectives canvassed the area, witnesses told them that Lowery had admitted to shooting Lloyd after the two men argued. Lowery himself, according to law-enforcement accounts cited in news reports, said that there had been a confrontation, that he left, and that he later returned with a firearm before shots were fired. The relationship between the two men was documented as that of neighbors, an everyday proximity that suddenly became central to a deadly dispute. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings nationwide, recorded Lloyd as the victim and Lowery as the subject-suspect in the incident, noting their neighbor relationship and describing Lowery’s status as “unharmed, arrested.”
Later that same day, according to an Arkansas arrest report summarized by a Little Rock television station, deputies located 18-year-old Makel Lowery and took him into custody at about 9:20 p.m. He was arrested on suspicion of murdering Frank Lloyd. That arrest report stated that Lowery confessed to shooting Lloyd after their confrontation, and he was booked into the Pulaski County jail on a charge of capital murder under Arkansas Code 5-10-101, with records listing the charge code for capital murder alongside an additional hold for the 7th Division Court.
In the months that followed, the case shifted from the immediate shock of the crime scene into the slower rhythm of the court system. At a bond hearing reported in August 2023, Lowery’s attorney characterized the shooting as an act of self-defense, arguing that the teenager opened fire only after his neighbor had previously wounded him in the back with a pellet gun. Prosecutors, according to the same coverage, disputed that account and treated the shooting as an unjustified killing. A judge set Lowery’s bond at $150,000, and public booking records show that he remained in custody on the capital-murder charge, with a later 2024 entry indicating he was being held for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, suggesting that his legal situation continued to unfold beyond the initial arrest.
For Pulaski County, Lloyd’s killing was not just another entry in a ledger. The case was recorded as the county’s tenth homicide of 2022, a grim milestone that underscored local concerns about rising gun violence. Online, Lloyd’s name appeared on memorial and crime-tracking sites: one gun-violence memorial page fixed his date of death as December 30, 2022, listed his age, and showed that dozens of virtual candles had been lit in his memory. Another summary site described in plain terms how a confrontation between neighbors on Tony Road had escalated into fatal gunfire. Taken together, these records trace the arc of a single winter afternoon in Sweet Home—from the first reports of shots fired, to the dying words that pointed deputies toward a suspect, to the arrest of an eighteen-year-old neighbor now facing one of the most serious charges in Arkansas law.
