Kafena Russell, 38, a Black/African American woman, was found shot to death alongside her brother, 37-year-old Johnny Russell, inside an apartment on Melrose Street in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on the morning of July 18, 2019. Officers were flagged down by a neighbor around 8 a.m. and led to the residence, where both siblings were discovered with fatal gunshot wounds. The apartment was near the Arkansas State University campus, and police immediately opened a double-homicide investigation.
Investigators quickly focused on Kafena’s boyfriend, 30-year-old Rhatez Demore Furlow. According to court records, the violence followed turmoil the night before: Kafena had returned unexpectedly and found Furlow with another woman, told him to leave the apartment, and the shooting occurred later on the night of July 17, 2019. Police arrested Furlow soon after the bodies were found, and he was held on a $5 million bond while facing two counts related to the killings.
The case moved through Craighead County Circuit Court, where a jury ultimately convicted Furlow of two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of committing a felony with a firearm. He was sentenced to a total of 150 years in prison, a judgment the Arkansas Court of Appeals affirmed on April 5, 2023. State records list Furlow as incarcerated in the Arkansas Department of Corrections following that conviction.
What began as a routine patrol response ended with a community grieving two siblings and a swift identification of a suspect who, according to the appellate opinion, was intimately tied to the victims’ lives. The discovery on July 18 closed a night of violence that had started hours earlier, and the subsequent prosecution brought finality in the courts: an arrest, a conviction, and a long sentence that stands after appeal.
