Deartis M. Flanigan Marshall was a 73-year-old Black woman from Hot Springs, Arkansas, whose life story stretched from the city streets of St. Louis to the quiet neighborhoods of a retirement town in the Ouachita Mountains. She was born in 1941 in St. Louis, Missouri, one of the children of Deathers and Minnie Rae Flanigan, and grew up in a close-knit family that would later spread across several states but remain tied together by memory and shared history. As a young woman she completed her schooling in St. Louis, developing a love for music and painting that gave her a calm, creative center throughout her life.
Years later, Deartis married Irving Eugene Marshall, Sr., beginning a partnership that would last more than three and a half decades. Their marriage carried them across the country; they spent time living in California before choosing to settle in Arkansas, where Hot Springs became the place they called home in their later years. Family remained at the heart of her world. She was remembered as a devoted mother to her son, Henry Walton, and a grandmother whose love folded easily around her grandchildren. Her relatives, spread from Memphis to St. Louis, Chicago, and Houston, knew her as a steady presence, the kind of person who encouraged others with simple kindness and quiet strength rather than grand gestures.
By August 2014, Deartis and Irving were in what their loved ones called their “seasons” of life: he in his seventy-fourth, she in her seventy-third. The obituary language would later describe their passing together as “sudden and untimely,” underscoring how little warning there was that anything was wrong. On Tuesday, August 19, 2014, the couple died in Arkansas, leaving family, friends, and their church and community circles stunned by the abruptness of the loss. For relatives who received the news by phone or word of mouth, it did not sound like the end of a long illness or the natural close of a quiet life, but a break in the middle of it—something violent that had ripped them away without giving anyone a chance to say goodbye.
Public records of the case sketch only a bare outline of what happened. Gun violence databases and memorial pages list Deartis as a victim who was “lost to gun violence” in Hot Springs on August 19, 2014, placing her among the many Americans whose deaths by firearm came without warning on an ordinary day. The same records show that Irving died in the same incident, his name appearing alongside hers not only as another person killed, but specifically as the “subject-suspect” connected to the shooting. A local television news headline, preserved in later summaries, reported that police described the couple’s deaths as a murder-suicide, signaling that investigators believed the violence had unfolded entirely within the relationship, with no outside assailant.
Because the only person identified as a suspect in those records died in the same event, there were no arrests reported in connection with the case, and there is no indication in the available public summaries that authorities sought additional suspects beyond Irving himself. What remains instead is the stark classification in crime and memorial databases: a domestic shooting that ended with both husband and wife dead, leaving law enforcement to close the file and family members to struggle with a tragedy that offered no second chances and few public answers.
In the months and years that followed, Deartis’s story lived on mostly through the memories of those who knew her and the brief lines of online memorials. Her name appears among lists of people killed by guns on that August day, a single entry on a page crowded with others, yet for her family each mention represents an entire life—of music and painting, of motherhood and marriage, of moves across states and the quiet routines of later years in Hot Springs. On a digital candle page, visitors marked her loss with small acts of remembrance, lighting virtual candles beside her photograph, turning a few lines of text into a place where grief could be acknowledged and where the lives of both Deartis and Irving could be recalled as more than just the circumstances of their deaths.
