Shoncoven Smith, a 22-year-old Black male, was shot and killed on January 25, 2014, after an argument on Little Rock’s Elam Street. As the dispute spilled into the open air around 6:30 p.m., gunfire cut through the block and left Smith mortally wounded while a 16-year-old boy trying to run from the chaos was struck several times but survived. The suddenness of the violence stunned the neighborhood and drew a fast, visible response from police, who began piecing together a timeline from
frightened witnesses and scattered shell casings.
Detectives quickly identified a suspect: 27-year-old Steven Roshawn Hayes. Authorities said the confrontation preceded the shooting and warned the public that Hayes should be considered armed and dangerous. Warrants were prepared for first-degree murder, first-degree battery, and possession of a firearm by certain persons as officers fanned out across the city, urging anyone who had seen the man or knew where he might be hiding to come forward. The case weighed on Smith’s family, who pleaded for accountability while mourning a son whose name soon appeared in funeral notices and online memorials.
More than a year after the killing, the search ended with Hayes in handcuffs. Little Rock police arrested him at a home on South Main on a Thursday night and announced that he would face charges of first-degree murder in Smith’s death and first-degree battery for the wounding of the teen. The arrest offered a measure of movement in a case that had begun with a street-corner argument and that, for months, had lived in the quiet persistence of a homicide file—one marked by the loss of a young father and the echo of shots fired on Elam Street.
In the years that followed, Smith’s name remained tethered to that night—in obituaries and remembrance pages that fixed his date of death and hometown, and in community tributes that spoke of a life interrupted. Those public records, alongside the police accounts, anchor the outline of what happened: a dispute, a flurry of bullets, a boy who lived, and an arrest that closed the distance between suspicion and custody.
