On a June night in 2015, Adrian D. Eley – a man from Prentiss, Mississippi whose last name appeared in different records as both Eley and Elly – found himself in the middle of a storm of jealousy and suspicion that had been building for days. In the weeks before his death, tension grew around his long-term relationship with Konswaylo Durr and rumors that she was romantically involved with Eric Darrell “Hubcap” Lott.
According to court records, Durr and Eley had been arguing, and Eley believed she and Lott were more than friends. A few nights before the shooting, the three crossed paths at a local gas station. Durr later testified that Eley confronted her and Lott over an alleged affair, that the argument escalated, and that she retrieved Lott’s gun from his car and fired at Eley’s vehicle, claiming she only meant to scare him and retaliate for him taking her belongings. Eley left that scene, but the resentment did not.
The night before the killing, things inside the home Durr shared with Eley spiraled further. Durr said she had learned that Eley was expecting a child with another woman and ordered him to leave. At one point, Eley tried to sneak back into the house by removing a bedroom air-conditioner unit; Durr responded by stabbing his hand to drive him away, then gave him a towel and water before leaving herself. Eley followed her to the Palmetto Estates Apartments on Highway 42 in Jefferson Davis County, where she happened to see Lott. She pulled her car alongside Lott’s vehicle and began talking with him in the parking lot, unaware that the confrontation that followed would be their last with Eley alive.
Just after midnight, in the early minutes of June 9, 2015, Eley walked up to Durr’s car outside the Palmetto Estates Apartments, still seething over the suspected affair. Witnesses later described him yelling at Durr and Lott, accusing them again of being involved. At some point he grabbed Lott’s cell phone. Durr testified that she and Lott tried to explain they were only friends, but tempers flared. She recalled Lott slamming his hands in front of her car and shouting at Eley to keep his name out of Eley’s mouth, insisting he was not sleeping with Durr. Then, according to her, Lott turned toward his car, walked away, and came back with his arm behind his back. Durr said that as soon as Eley started to run, Lott began firing. She told the jury that Eley was unarmed and that she never heard him threaten Lott that night.
Lott’s account to investigators and the court painted himself as a man cornered. He claimed that in the weeks before the shooting, Eley had been threatening him over his friendship with Durr, and that he had even told a sheriff’s investigator someone was threatening him, though he never provided a name. On the night of the killing, Lott said Eley not only seized his phone but hit him in the chest, shoved him, and continued to yell. Lott emphasized Eley’s larger size and reputation for aggressive behavior and said he tried to get into his car and leave but that Eley followed him. According to Lott, he then reached for the gun lying on his driver’s seat and fired six or seven shots, later telling investigators that he panicked, felt threatened and scared, and believed it was “too late” once Eley saw him reaching for the weapon.
The bullets tore through the quiet apartment complex. Deputies were called to Palmetto Estates around 12:12 a.m. after reports of shots fired. Eley collapsed from multiple gunshot wounds, including injuries to his upper back or chest, leg, and arm, as later documented by medical examiners and a surgeon who treated him. A bystander, identified in local reporting as Willie Daggins, was struck in the leg during the gunfire. Emergency responders rushed Eley first to Jefferson Davis Community Hospital and then to Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, where he died of his injuries. Daggins was reported in good condition after treatment. Meanwhile, authorities said Lott fled the scene in a white 2004 GMC Yukon, considered armed and dangerous, before ultimately turning himself in to the Jefferson Davis County Sheriff’s Department around mid-afternoon later that day.
In the immediate aftermath, investigators from the sheriff’s department and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation interviewed Lott after reading him his Miranda rights. They later testified that Lott admitted shooting Eley but insisted he did so in self-defense. One investigator recalled Lott acknowledging that Eley was not armed at the time and focusing instead on Eley’s accusations about an affair with Durr and his own fear of being hurt. Forensic testimony at trial, though, underscored the severity of the shooting: the deputy chief medical examiner and the surgeon who operated on Eley described multiple entrance wounds consistent with shots entering from behind or from the side as Eley moved away, including a wound that entered through his back and others to his leg and arm.
The legal process that followed stretched for years. Authorities charged Eric Darrell “Hubcap” Lott with murder for killing Adrian Eley and with aggravated assault for the wounding of the bystander. At his first court appearance, a justice court judge in Jefferson Davis County denied him bond, and local television reported that he stood accused of shooting Eley during an argument at the apartment complex and then fleeing, with the aggravated assault charge tied to the bystander’s injury. A grand jury later formally indicted him for Eley’s murder and for aggravated assault.
When the case reached trial in Jefferson Davis County Circuit Court, prosecutors presented the parking-lot shooting as the culmination of a bitter domestic dispute and jealousy, arguing that Lott gunned down an unarmed man who was trying to get away. They leaned on Durr’s testimony that Eley was running when the shots rang out and that she never saw a weapon in his hands, as well as medical evidence showing wounds entering from the back. The defense framed Lott as a man pushed past his breaking point by weeks of threats and harassment from a larger, volatile rival, insisting that when Eley confronted and shoved him that night, Lott reasonably feared serious harm.
The jury’s verdict did not fully embrace either side’s narrative. While Lott had been indicted for murder, jurors found him guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter in Eley’s death and acquitted him of the aggravated assault charge related to the bystander. The trial judge sentenced Lott to twenty years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Lott appealed, arguing that his lawyer had been ineffective, that one of the State’s medical witnesses should not have been allowed to testify as an expert in the way he did, and that the trial judge had improperly assisted the prosecution. In July 2018, the Mississippi Court of Appeals rejected those claims and affirmed the conviction and sentence, leaving Eric Darrell Lott’s manslaughter conviction in place and fixing, in the public record, the story of how a tangled web of suspicion and anger at Palmetto Estates ended with the death of Adrian D. Eley.
