Donney Keith Ballew, a 64-year-old White / Caucasian man from North Little Rock, Arkansas, spent most of his life rooted in the central Arkansas communities where he was born and raised. He came into the world on June 23, 1956, in Little Rock, the son of Everett Dwight Ballew and Juanita May Langrell, and grew up within a close-knit family whose names would later reappear in the lines of his obituary: parents, grandparents Thomas and Stella Ballew and Cecil and Reva Langrell, and brothers Cecil
Thomas, John David and James Everett, all of whom passed before him. In adulthood he became a father himself, with children named Skyler and Jordyn Ballew, Misty Brooks and Casey Garner, and a sister, Linda, who remained part of his life. Friends and relatives remembered him as someone whose absence didn’t feel quite real, a man who taught others how to hunt and fish and, as one friend put it, how to “love with my heart wide open,” leaving behind a circle of people who spoke of him with warmth and grief after his passing.
In late February 2021, that long, ordinary life intersected with sudden violence. Public records and news accounts describe him as having died on Friday, February 26, 2021, in North Little Rock, his death later listed among the city and county’s gun homicides that year. A case summary compiled from law-enforcement reporting states that he was fatally shot in the 6000 block of Hudman Road in North Little Rock, a location in Pulaski County just outside the dense urban grid. The initial circumstances were left largely in shadow: authorities acknowledged the killing but did not immediately explain what brought Ballew and his killer or killers together that day, or what kind of dispute or encounter ended in gunfire. The early descriptions of the case emphasized how little was known outside the investigative files and invited the public to come forward with any information, underscoring that whatever had unfolded on that stretch of road had happened away from cameras and crowds.
At nearly the same time, North Little Rock police were called to a separate but related scene that would become the public face of the investigation. On a Sunday morning around 10:30 a.m., officers responded to reports of a shooting in the 4700 block of Alpha Street, a residential area where neighbors woke to flashing lights and crime-scene tape. In the front yard of a home there, police found Ballew suffering from at least one gunshot wound; he was pronounced dead at the scene. The city identified him in news releases and local coverage as the victim in North Little Rock’s first homicide of 2021, and the quiet suburban yard where he was discovered became the place most residents associated with his death, even as other records pointed back to Hudman Road as the location of the underlying incident.
Detectives spent the days that followed tracing what had happened between those locations and who was responsible. Within a little over a week, North Little Rock police announced they had made an arrest: Jeremy Johnson, a 36-year-old man from Jacksonville, was taken into custody and charged with capital murder in connection with Ballew’s killing. According to summaries of the department’s statements, investigators tied Johnson to the February shooting that left Ballew dead and described the case as the resolution of the city’s first homicide of the year. Local television and newspaper reports recounted how Johnson’s arrest came after days of work by homicide detectives, but they did not spell out a motive or detail exactly what linked him to the crime, leaving the public to know only that a named suspect was facing the gravest charge under Arkansas law.
The story of the investigation did not end there. More than a year after the killing, the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office announced a separate arrest tied to the same death. On March 12, 2022, deputies took 64-year-old Larry Wayne Storm into custody and charged him with first-degree murder in Ballew’s case, specifying that the incident in which Ballew was killed had taken place in the 6000 block of Hudman Road. The sheriff’s office did not release further details, declining to clarify Storm’s alleged role, how he was connected to Ballew, or how his case fit alongside the earlier capital-murder charge against Johnson. News coverage of Storm’s arrest noted only that it was connected to a February 2021 homicide and named Ballew as the victim, underscoring that multiple people had now been accused in relation to the same killing while much of the narrative remained locked in court documents and investigative files not summarized for the public.
While the criminal cases moved into the slow rhythms of hearings and filings, Ballew’s life was being remembered in a different register. His obituary, published in March 2021, spoke less of crime scenes and charges than of family lines and shared memories—of children who would miss him, a sister left behind, and friends who wrote about long days spent outdoors and the sense that he had always been close to their families. Online memorials and gun-violence archives added his name to a long list of people “lost to gun violence” in Arkansas, placing his portrait among thousands of others while community forums revisited the case whenever a new arrest or update surfaced. Between those brief, factual entries and the more personal remembrances runs a quiet thread: a man whose life, rooted in central Arkansas and woven through with family and friendship, ended in a way that left questions hanging in the air—about what happened on Hudman Road and Alpha Street that winter, why it happened, and how those responsible would finally be held to account.
