(The Center Square) – Bullets tore through a Shreveport apartment, instantly killing a one-year-old child.
The two men charged with the murder had a long history of past convictions, including kidnapping, narcotics and weapons counts. Despite their criminal records they were not in prison and therefore, police and prosecutors say, fired the shots that killed Karter Martin two years ago on Feb. 11. Bullets pierced a door and window, also striking the child’s father, Isaiah Cooks, 27, who was critically injured but survived.
“If shots are fired at you, the bullets have no name on them,” Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith told The Center Square when asked about the case. “They’ll hit whatever is in their line of travel.”
Court records show the accused killers could have been put away long before the bullets flew. Both men were on probation at the time. One of them, Demond Baber, had been spared jail time on felony charges just 10 weeks before the shooting that killed Karter.
The baby’s killing points to a grim reality that plagues Louisiana and the nation and has some states rethinking their criminal codes. An investigation by The Center Square found recidivists – those repeat criminals who cycle in and out of jails and courtrooms – are behind the vast majority of northwest Louisiana’s homicides and those around the country.
Of 81 suspects charged with 2024 and 2025 murders in Shreveport and Caddo Parish, 70% had prior arrest records in local courts, The Center Square found. The statistic is similar but slightly higher than the national trend found the last time the issue was comprehensively studied. A 2006 report by the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics examined 1990 to 2002 felony convictions in the nation’s 75 most populous counties. That analysis found 67% of murderers had an arrest record.
“There doesn’t seem to be very many first offenders that we run across,” Chief Smith said. “Most of the suspects will have continuous, multiple criminal records … The system, however it’s designed, is not effective in rehabilitating them or changing their behavior.”
Such was the case in dozens of 2024 and 2025 murder cases examined in Caddo Parish. Some examples:
• Victor Bradley, 30, is accused of killing Tavarae Loneman and Erica Pitts, both found shot to death in a parked car in March 2024. Bradley had a prior record of drug possession, domestic abuse and theft. Three years before the killings he faced charges of aggravated assault with a firearm and carrying a concealed weapon by a person convicted of domestic abuse, but in a plea deal, he received just one year in prison and three years on probation. Court records show he almost had his probation revoked in 2022 over a marijuana arrest and failing to keep up with probation terms. That would have put him behind bars when the killings happened, but in a hearing Caddo District Court Judge Chris Victory opted to leave him on probation, court records show.
• Brothers Kelvin Lewis, 39, and Larry Lewis, 45, face federal charges of killing pharmaceuticals delivery driver Billy Lee Jamison in a carjacking outside a Walgreens in January 2025. Three years earlier, Kelvin Lewis had been sentenced to one year for bringing contraband into a penal institution. Larry Lewis’ long arrest record includes drug possession, domestic abuse, theft and simple battery. At the time of the killing, records show he had narcotics and indecent behavior with juveniles charges pending in Caddo courts. In 2018, Larry Lewis pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of resisting an officer and criminal trespass in Shreveport City Court, receiving credit for time served.
• Nicholas Alexander, 58, is accused of gunning down Vivian Police Officer Marc Brock as he executed a warrant for cyberstalking in November 2025. Alexander had a criminal record dating back more than three decades, having previously faced charges of assault, battery, and domestic abuse. The District Attorney’s Office dismissed an aggravated assault charge in 1997. For domestic abuse battery, a 2010 six-month sentence was mostly suspended, shortened to 10 days with Alexander placed on supervised probation for a year and a half.
But no killing in recent years illustrates the problem as starkly as the death of 1-year-old Karter at Stonevista Apartments in Stoner Hill. There were five suspects charged in connection with the case. Two men only faced firearms charges, one man had murder charges reduced down to a possession of stolen firearms charge. All five had been through Louisiana criminal courts before, four of them previously charged with violent offenses.
Deanthony Griffin, 29, the accused triggerman, was a repeat offender who pleaded guilty to simple kidnapping in 2020, sentenced to two years in prison for grabbing an ex-girlfriend by her hair and forcing her into a car.
Demond Baber, 24, also charged with second-degree murder, had been treated lightly in Caddo Parish District Court the prior November. With a possible mandatory prison sentence on narcotics and weapons charges stemming from an earlier incident, he pleaded down to a single “attempted” charge of carrying illegal weapons. He received no jail time.
With sweetheart deals like that, Lisa Reese Massingill said The Center Square’s findings don’t surprise her. Massingill runs the Facebook group Caddo Mama Bears, which tracks courts and crime and has become a sounding board for fed up residents.
“It has become so easy for (criminals) to commit a crime, and they don’t worry about consequences to their actions,” she said.
District Attorney James Stewart did not respond to an interview request from The Center Square for this story. DA spokeswoman Ivy Woodard said he was too busy to speak last week. But four days after Karter’s death in 2024, Stewart defended his office in a media interview, specifically his office’s handling of prior charges against the alleged triggerman.
Stewart told KSLA News 12 that in the simple kidnapping case, a more serious home invasion charge that could have put Griffin behind bars longer had to be dismissed, because the victim told investigators Griffin lived in the home. So there couldn’t have been a home invasion.
“I think that it’s certain people who want to target us because they don’t understand what we do,” Stewart told the TV station. “And we’re bound to follow the constitutional laws to go forward. If we don’t have the evidence, we can’t go forward.”
What to do about it
The Center Square examined 103 killings in Caddo Parish and Shreveport in 2024 and 2025, finding 67 cases where one or more person had been charged with murder or manslaughter. To check arrest records, TCS examined District Court records, city court records in Shreveport and neighboring Bossier City, jail booking records, Louisiana prison records, police and DA’s office press releases, and statements by police and prosecutors quoted in local media. For some cases, the Shreveport Police Department and the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office assisted in confirming prior records.
The Center Square found 48 of the 81 persons charged in killings (59%) had rap sheets that included violent prior offenses, felony and misdemeanor – including assault, simple battery, crimes against children, domestic abuse, armed robbery, resisting an officer and possession of dangerous weapons.
So of the 57 murder suspects with prior records, 84% had previously been arrested for violent offenses.
“It isn’t surprising,” Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux, an attorney, said of The Center Square’s findings. “People don’t usually start at murder. They start at something else.”
Among the cases, Lederrick Gant, 38, is accused of killing his own mother, Sharon Gosey, with a .40-caliber pistol in April 2024. His background includes multiple arrests for simple battery and resisting an officer.
Jeremy Hill, 40, is charged with pulling a gun and killing Davante Johnson during an argument outside Enclave Apartments in July 2024. His prior arrests include flight from an officer, armed robbery and simple battery.
And Bradley Joel Weidner, 48, is charged with the December killing of Everett King Jr., whose body was found by fishermen under the Bayou Pierre bridge. Earlier that year Weidner had been sentenced to two years’ probation on narcotics charges out of Webster Parish, court records show. He also pleaded guilty to resisting an officer by flight in Bossier City Court, sentenced to a year on supervised probation with an order to attend an anger management course.
The victim under the bridge had been stabbed to death, according to the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office.
Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute focusing on public safety, said he blames weak laws and inadequacies at all levels of the American criminal justice system for failing to isolate dangerous criminals from the law-abiding population.
“The nature of our violence problem is one that is rooted in repeat offending,” said Mangual, author of the book Criminal (In)Justice, which criticized the push for policing and sentencing reforms following the 2020 deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks. “Unfortunately, our system allows these individuals to cycle through the courts, the jails and the prisons multiple times over the course of their careers, really until they do the most terrible possible thing that they could do.”
For that reason, several state legislatures have been backtracking on some of the softer criminal justice policies of the 2010s, when reforms aimed at rehabilitation and keeping low-level offenders from taking up jail space swept the country. Louisiana is among those changing course, as are Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida and New Jersey.
In the early 2010s Louisiana had the nation’s highest incarceration rate with a state prison population approaching 40,000. In 2017, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed off on a package of reforms that passed in the legislature with bipartisan support. Among other things, the new laws made more offenders eligible for parole, shortened maximum probation terms, reduced sentences for some nonviolent offenses, and reduced fines and fees. Nonviolent crime decreased and the state reportedly saved more than $150 million over several years through a reduced prison population.
Soon after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry took office in 2024, he called a special session to deal with violent crime. The Legislature approved two measures proposed by state Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner – a truth-in-sentencing law requiring inmates to serve at least 85% of their original sentence, and another eliminating discretionary parole.
“For those of you who believe parole should be considered for a person 18 years or older who commits a heinous crime, we simply disagree,” Rep. Villio said at the Capitol during debate on the measures in 2024. “After justice reform, we still lead the nation in homicides for the 35th year in a row. We are still the fifth state in terms of crime. Members, don’t fall for the false narrative.”
Villio’s office did not respond to interview requests from The Center Square for this story.
The nonprofit JFA Institute has predicted the truth-in-sentencing measure could see the state’s prison population climb as high as 55,800 by 2034. It currently stands at about 31,000, an increase from 28,100 at the end of 2023, according to the state Department of Public Safety & Corrections. The Crime and Justice Institute predicts building more prisons could cost Louisiana taxpayers as much as $2 billon.
Already, corrections has asked for another $82 million in its budget to deal with the growing inmate population.
Murders are down
Wanda Bertram, spokeswoman for the Prison Policy Initiative, which opposes Gov. Landry’s new measures, said research does not bear out that longer prison sentences deter crime or lead to lower recidivism rates. She said governments waste taxpayer money by keeping offenders in prison longer than necessary.
“In my mind, small fluctuations in crime are neither a reason to all of a sudden radically change the kind of punishment that we’re giving to people who commit crimes, nor are they a reason to attribute success or failure to existing laws,” Bertram said. “You have to take the big-picture long view. And in the long view, we’re still at lows that we haven’t seen in over half a century.”
During the period The Center Square examined Shreveport’s homicides, murder numbers have been falling, mirroring national trends.
The Caddo coroner’s office reported 91 homicides in 2021, 52 homicides in 2022, and 83 homicides in 2023.
Discounting three police shootings and one killing in self defense, The Center Square counted 54 persons murdered in 2024, and 49 persons murdered last year.
Statewide, violent crimes have been on a downward trend since 2021, but the state’s overall crime rate is still 45 percent higher than the national average, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
“Most people don’t believe some of the statistics. They believe they get skewed,” Massingill, who runs the Facebook group, said. “There are less homicides, but they hear gunshots every night in the city. They still don’t feel safe in their city.”
