In the predawn hours of Friday, November 13, 2020, Cedrick Smith, a 40-year-old man from Wesson, Mississippi, was found dead inside his home on Russell Circle. Deputies from the Copiah County Sheriff’s Office arrived to a quiet residential street where the normal stillness of early morning had been broken by the arrival of patrol cars and investigators. Inside a house in the 1100 block of Russell Circle, they discovered Smith’s body; authorities would soon say he had apparently died from a gunshot wound, and they treated the scene as a homicide from the start. His body was sent to the Mississippi Crime Laboratory for an autopsy as investigators began the difficult work of piecing together what had happened in those final moments.
News of the killing spread quickly through Wesson and across local media. Reports emphasized that Smith had been found in his own home off Russell Circle early that Friday morning, underscoring the sense that violence had invaded a place that should have been safe. Law enforcement asked anyone who might have seen or heard something to come forward, directing tipsters to the Copiah County Sheriff’s Office and to regional Crime Stoppers lines. The appeals painted a picture of a community being asked to help solve the murder of a neighbor whose life had been cut short without any public explanation of why.
Even as officers processed the house on Russell Circle, another thread in the story was already in motion. Two days earlier, on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, a kidnapping in Copiah County had prompted a regional alert. Investigators named two suspects: 25-year-old Donald James Free and 30-year-old Monica Denise Barnett. A public bulletin warned that the pair were wanted in connection with the kidnapping and were believed to be traveling together in a white 2001 Nissan Altima sedan with Mississippi tag JCA2783. Authorities described them as armed and dangerous and urged anyone who spotted them or knew their whereabouts to contact the sheriff’s office immediately.
Within days, that earlier kidnapping alert converged with the investigation into Smith’s killing. In mid-November, Copiah County authorities announced that Free and Barnett had been taken into custody with the assistance of the Crystal Springs Police Department. Both were charged not only in the kidnapping but also with the murder of a man identified in news reports as Cedric Smith, whom officials said had been killed the previous Friday. The public statements were sparse on narrative detail: they did not lay out a motive, nor did they clearly explain how the events of November 11 and November 13 were connected, but they made it clear that investigators believed the pair had played central roles in the violence that ended Smith’s life.
In the years that followed, the case moved from the headlines into the courts. Public records from the Mississippi Department of Corrections show that in June 2023, Monica Barnett was convicted of second-degree murder in Copiah County and sentenced to twenty-five years in state prison, with a tentative release date in 2045. The same day, records for Donald Free show convictions out of Copiah County for accessory after the fact, obstruction or hindering, and possession of a weapon by a felon, with an effective total sentence of twenty years and a tentative release date in 2038.
Those bare official entries, combined with the earlier arrest announcements, sketch the legal aftermath of the killing: a man shot to death in his Wesson home, a rapid investigation that tied the crime to an already unfolding kidnapping case, the arrest of two suspects, and, eventually, long prison sentences imposed in Copiah County court. What remains largely absent in the public record are the intimate details—what drew Smith into the paths of the people now imprisoned, what was said in the moments before the gun was fired, and how his family and neighbors have carried on since. The available accounts leave a stark outline: a quiet street in Wesson, a home turned into a crime scene, and a community that had to absorb the loss of a man whose death, while legally addressed through convictions, still echoes in the unanswered questions it left behind.
