Woman acquitted in shooting

Marion gets probation for trying to run over fast-food worker

A 29-year-old Little Rock woman squealed with delight, jumped up and down and hugged her attorneys, Lou Marczuk and Harrison Tome, after learning Wednesday that she was about to be released from jail after 6½ months.

Audrey Monique Field Marion wasn’t even sure what day it was but when told, she cheerfully called out to family and friends, “I’ll see you in church.”

Pulaski County jurors had just acquitted Marion in the shooting of her ex-boyfriend and of the threat to shoot his sister in August.

The eight women and four men had deliberated a little more than an hour to find her innocent of first-degree battery and terroristic threatening, which together carried a potential 26-year sentence.

But the acquittal alone wasn’t enough to get her out of jail.

It was only when Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson sentenced Marion to probation for her other crime, a February 2016 attempt to run over a fast-food worker, that her freedom was guaranteed.

Johnson had convicted Marion in December of aggravated assault for trying to run over Church’s Chicken worker Tracey Ekuba-michael outside the John Barrow Road eatery last February.

The Class D felony carries a sentence of up to six years in prison. Johnson imposed five years of probation, conditioned on Marion’s enrollment in anger-management classes, with a $1,000 fine.

Her sentencing on the fast-food assault was scheduled to coincide with her jury trial on the shooting charges.

Marion was on trial over accusations by former boyfriend Ben Brown that she’d shot him in the leg outside the home he shared with his sister at the Shadow Lake apartments on West Markham Street. Shantell Brown said Marion also had threatened to shoot her before firing off three more shots.

Marczuk questioned how Ben Brown’s version of events made sense. He told jurors there was just as much evidence that Brown accidentally had shot himself with a ricocheting bullet as there was that Marion had done it.

“It could’ve been fired by him,” Marczuk said in his closing argument. “It’s just as consistent with the evidence.”

Brown testified that he’d taken Marion to the hospital that day for hand surgery, then took her to get her medication before they ate at McDonald’s. She’d paid him $20 for driving her around, he told jurors.

Brown said he also broke up with her that same day by texting her that he never wanted to see or hear from her again. He testified he couldn’t remember why he’d ended their two-month relationship like that.

He told jurors that he had been napping when he was awakened by his sister and Marion talking in the doorway of the apartment. Brown said Marion was accusing him of stealing $75.

“I said, ‘I don’t have your money. What are you talking about?’” Brown testified, describing how she pulled a gun and, her hands shaking, pointed it at him. “She said, ‘I’ll shoot you in your face.’”

Brown said he wasn’t afraid of the gun and stepped closer to Marion.

“I almost put my head to the barrel because I had no fear,” he said.

He turned to walk back into the apartment when she shot him in the right leg, Brown told jurors. He didn’t immediately realize he’d been hit, he said.

He walked inside, locked the door and then, bleeding from his wound, fell to the floor and crawled to the refrigerator.

“I heard a shot. I knew who fired it,” Brown said. “I was thinking I needed to put fluids in that was coming out.”

Brown’s demeanor on the witness stand Tuesday prompted Marczuk to question whether Brown was sober, which led to a brief jury recess so the judge also could question Brown.

The judge denied Marczuk’s request to test Brown for drugs after Brown testified that he hadn’t taken anything, even his prescription medication for his leg injury

But Marczuk recalled Brown’s demeanor for jurors, and asked whether they found him, a convicted felon, trustworthy.

“Why wouldn’t Brown look me in the eye? Why wouldn’t he look at y’all?” Marczuk said. “Would you buy a car from Ben Brown? If you wouldn’t buy a car from Ben Brown, then how can you use his word to convict her?”

“We’re not trying to sell you something. We’re trying to provide a little bit of justice to Ben Brown,” deputy prosecutor Jayme Butts-Hall said. “He doesn’t have a clean record, but that doesn’t mean he deserves to get shot.”

She and prosecutor Katie Hinojosa said Marion instigated a confrontation with the Brown siblings when she showed up at their apartment after being told she was not wanted there.

Police found evidence of the shooting, and his sister saw it happen, Hinojosa said.

“A man was shot. His sister saw it,” she told jurors. “Everything else is misdirection … smoke and mirrors.”

Marion, who has a 2008 conviction for felony child endangerment, did not testify. In an October letter to the judge, she wrote that Brown had shot at her when she tried to get her missing $75 back. The money disappeared after she had asked him to hold her purse during her surgery. The letter also suggests that either Brown shot himself or had his sister do it.

The letter states that she’s the one who broke up with Brown to straighten out her life but had stayed friendly with him and his sister because they all attended the same church.

“Why wouldn’t Brown look me in the eye? Why wouldn’t he look at y’all? Would you buy a car from Ben Brown? If you wouldn’t buy a car from Ben Brown, then how can you use his word to convict her?”

— Lou Marczuk, attorney for Audrey Monique Field Marion