Lennard Sumner was at his West Memphis, Arkansas home on January 25, 2018, when an argument with a younger man escalated into gunfire. In the exchange, Sumner was shot in the chest. Gravely wounded, he managed to return fire, injuring the assailant, before the violence abruptly stilled the house and the neighborhood around it. News accounts would later record the date and place as yet another entry in the city’s grim ledger of lives taken by bullets.
Investigators identified the shooter as Jamie Pernell Horns. Within a week of the killing, Horns was booked into the Crittenden County jail, and the case moved through the courts while friends and family mourned the quiet man whose life had been cut short. The early charging documents reflected the gravity of what had happened—homicide and a firearm offense—signaling a path toward a long sentence if the state secured a conviction.
A year later, on January 25, 2019, the arc of the case reached its legal conclusion in a Crittenden County courtroom. Horns pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by certain persons for the shooting that killed Sumner, acknowledging that the fatal shot followed their argument inside Sumner’s home. The plea spared a trial and brought a measure of finality: a 30-year prison sentence for Horns, who had been wounded when Sumner fired back. With the plea and sentence on the record, the case was closed with a single convicted offender and no indication of additional suspects.
