Plea deal gets killer of wife 30 years

HOT SPRINGS — A man was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in the 2019 shooting of his wife, which he claimed was a drunken accident.

Levar Leron Strickland, 43, who has remained in custody in lieu of a $1 million bond since his arrest June 22, 2019, was initially charged with second-degree murder in the death of Stephanie Malicoat, 40, inside their residence at 315 N. Patterson St. The charge was later upgraded to first-degree murder after one of the victim’s children provided additional information to police.

Strickland pleaded guilty to the upgraded charge during a Garland County Circuit Court hearing held at the detention center and will have to serve 70%, or 21 years, before he is eligible for parole, chief deputy prosecutor Kara Petro told The Sentinel-Record shortly after the hearing Tuesday.

Petro said the victim’s mother and children had agreed to the plea and sentence, noting a major concern was the child having to face Strickland and testify against him in court if they had gone to trial.

She said the child was already traumatized by his mother’s death and would have been traumatized again by having to testify about it in court.

“I feel the sentence was appropriate given how traumatic that could have been,” she said.

The child was “ready, willing and able” to testify, Petro said, but she thought it was in his best interests not to have to go through that ordeal. She also noted at trial that Strickland’s attorney would have argued Strickland was “extremely intoxicated” at the time of the incident and that the shooting was accidental.

“Intoxication is not a legal defense in this case, but you never know what a jury might do,” Petro said, noting jurors might have had doubts that it was intentional and found him guilty of second-degree murder, and his sentence would have been much less.

Additional felony charges of criminal use of a prohibited weapon and possession of a defaced firearm, stemming from his use of a sawed-off shotgun with the serial number filed off in the shooting of Malicoat, and three counts of endangering the welfare of a minor because children were present at the time of the shooting were withdrawn as part of the plea.

The shotgun was illegal because the barrel was cut down to just under 12 inches and all the markings and serial numbers had been filed off.

There were five children in the home at the time of the shooting, along with one adult witness.

The adult witness told police that two weeks before the shooting, Strickland had threatened during an argument to shoot Malicoat.