LR man sentenced to 15 years for murder of Jonesboro man.

A 63-year-old Little Rock man, linked to a July homicide by a bloody palm print, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Sentencing papers filed Sunday by deputy prosecutor Melissa Brown show that Robert Johnson Jr. pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, reduced from first-degree murder, for the beating death of 38-year-old Shawn Price of Jonesboro in exchange for the 15-year sentence from Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson.

Johnson, represented by public defender Lou Marczuk, faced up to 30 years on the Class A felony charge.

The body of an unidentified man was found shortly before 11 a.m. July 8 in the back of 1501 S. Elm St. by property owner James Coleman, who called police.

Detectives Aaron Oncken and Erik Temple followed a 15-foot blood trail from the remains into the empty house, discovering a bloody handprint, later matched to Johnson, on the back door.

The trail led the detectives to a pool of blood in a room where investigators located a mattress and personal items belonging to Johnson, according to a police report by Detective Matt Harrelson.

Killed by blunt-force trauma, Price, a father of two, had been dead for some time so it took a day before he could be identified through his fingerprints. Price was on probation for drug charges out of Craighead County and had been living at the Little Rock Compassion Center homeless shelter on Roosevelt Road, court records and police reports show.

Coleman said he did not know the victim but told officers he had a man he knew as Robert Gillium living at the house to keep thieves away.

Shown a photo lineup, Coleman identified Johnson as the man he knew as Robert Gillium, and detectives got a warrant for Johnson’s arrest, court filings show. A police manhunt assisted by the U.S. marshals tracked Johnson to his sister’s home at 1512 S. Buchanan St., where he was arrested July 10. He’s been in jail ever since.

In an interview with detectives Terry McDaniel and Harrelson, Johnson said he’d gotten to the house sometime around July 3, entering through a window to find a stranger, shirtless and shoeless, in the residence drinking a bottle of alcohol. Johnson said he approached the man and they got into a fight. The struggle moved into the back yard where Johnson said he picked up something and hit the man with it, the defendant told investigators, court filings show.

Johnson said the fight ended with the stranger flat on his back in the yard and he fled, pausing to gather his things and to burn his shirt in a barrel in the yard. Johnson told investigators he didn’t call police because he was scared.

Court records show that when he was arrested Johnson was on probation for first-degree battery for stabbing a neighbor in North Little Rock in June 2016.

The victim, Parnell May, 44, was cut so deeply that part of his intestines were exposed. May and Johnson had apartments in a duplex on Washington Street.

May told police that he had been beating Johnson’s apartment with a stick because of loud noise coming from Johnson’s apartment, and that Johnson had emerged and stabbed him.

Johnson told officers that he had been protecting himself from May, who had attacked him with a knife in one hand and a belt wrapped around the other. Johnson said he’d taken the knife away from May and stabbed him. He also directed police to the weapon, a red-handled paring knife that was daubed with apparent blood.

In a subsequent interview with detectives, May reportedly denied telling police that he’d been hitting Johnson’s apartment. He said Johnson had called the police on him twice the night before to complain about noise from May’s apartment and that Johnson had attacked him with the knife unprovoked when the men happened to walk out onto their shared front porch at the same time.

Witnesses to the encounter were Johnson’s girlfriend, Janice Gail Tatum, and May’s girlfriend, Ann Marie Mireles. Each woman lived with her boyfriend, and each offered a version of events favorable to her partner.

Six months later, Mireles was dead, and Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies named May as her killer. Her half-naked body was found on the front steps of the Vaughn Road duplex in North Little Rock that she and May had moved into three days earlier.

Deputies who arrested May reported finding him hiding under the couple’s bed with Mireles’ blood spattered on his clothes and boots.

Authorities say Mireles had been beaten over an extended period. She had so many injuries — broken ribs, bruises, cuts and scrapes from head to toe — that doctors could not count them all.

Police seized a walking cane from the house, along with a metal pipe that had Mireles’ blood on one end and DNA from May on the other, according to reports.

May’s cellphone also held four photographs of the badly injured, but still alive, Mireles taken less than eight hours before her body was found, according to testimony.

She was punched so hard in the face that her teeth were driven through her lips. She suffered a blow so severe that her liver was ripped in two, an injury that’s more commonly inflicted by car crashes than by homicides, the medical testimony said.

May represented himself at his first-degree murder trial in January 2018, telling jurors that Mireles had not been murdered or even beaten like authorities claimed.

May told jurors that Mireles was killed by the medical personnel who tried to revive her, saying their rough handling inflicted the lethal liver injury and that they poisoned her with the equivalent of rubbing alcohol.

May’s behavior at his trial — which included repeated tirades and outbursts — led to him being repeatedly ejected from the proceeding, which ended in a mistrial. He’s scheduled to stand trial again in August.