Antony King, a 40-year-old Black / African American man, was at a residence on McDaniel Drive in southwest Little Rock when a late-night disturbance turned deadly in October 2020. In the quiet hours just after 1 a.m., someone inside the home reported hearing a commotion followed by gunfire. When that person went to look, they found King in another part of the residence, wounded by a gunshot, and called for help.
Police from the city’s Southwest Division were dispatched to the 7700 block of McDaniel Drive in response to the shooting report.
Officers arrived to find King gravely injured inside the residence. Despite their response, he was pronounced dead at the scene, and his body was later taken to the Arkansas State Crime Lab for an autopsy, standard procedure in a homicide investigation. The address and circumstances placed the killing in a residential pocket of southwest Little Rock, and detectives began treating the case as a homicide as they secured the scene and documented the evidence around the home.
From the very beginning, investigators’ attention centered on a young woman who had remained at the scene. She was identified as a 19-year-old who had been directly involved in the shooting and who, according to police, knew King personally. Officers spoke with her the night of the shooting, as well as with other people who had been present in the residence when the gunfire broke out. Authorities emphasized that the relationship between the two meant there was no broader danger to the public, suggesting that what had happened grew out of a conflict within that household rather than a random attack.
In the days that followed, detectives conducted their preliminary investigation, interviewing the young woman again and rechecking the accounts of other occupants who had been in the home. Once they had completed their work at the police level, the case file was forwarded to the Pulaski County Prosecutor’s Office for a full review, a step that signaled that prosecutors would make the final determination on whether the woman would face criminal charges. During this period there were no public announcements of any new suspects or of a search for additional assailants; the focus of the official narrative remained on the single woman who had been at the residence and spoken with officers that night.
Roughly a year after King’s death, prosecutors issued their decision. After examining the investigative file, including the interviews with the woman and other witnesses from inside the home, the Pulaski County prosecutor ruled that the shooting was justified. Police announced that no charges would be filed against the young woman and that she had been formally cleared in October 2021. With that ruling, the case, which had begun as a homicide investigation in a southwest Little Rock home, was effectively closed from a criminal standpoint, leaving King’s death recorded in public archives as a fatal shooting for which no one would be prosecuted.
