Gunplay suspect’s pal slain this year

A man accused of firing the first shots in a gunfight that injured 28 people at a Little Rock nightclub in July has connections to a gang member slain in the city’s first homicide of the year.

Police reports and social media posts show that Tyler Clay Jackson, 19, had ties to Mashon Lamar Jackson, a 20-year-old man who was fatally shot in January and whom police identified as a gang member afterward. Tyler Jackson posted photos of them together online after Mashon Jackson’s death, writing “longliveshon” and “justice4shon” and calling Mashon his “brother,” according to a Facebook account in his name.

Police on Thursday declined to comment on the relationship between the two. Police also declined to say whether Tyler Jackson has any gang associations. Though the department has said from the beginning that the gunplay July 1 at Power Ultra Lounge involved feuding gangs, it has withheld other information on the matter.

Tyler Jackson pleaded innocent Thursday morning in Little Rock District Court. He faces six counts of aggravated assault and three counts of second-degree battery. Judge Hugh Finkelstein ordered Jackson to be held at the Pulaski County jail in lieu of $500,000 bond after he’s released from the Faulkner County jail in an unrelated case.

Police suspect that Jackson was the first of several people to open fire during a rap concert at the now-closed nightclub. An arrest report says that he “fired recklessly into a crowd” and struck at least three people.

In all, 25 people were injured by gunfire. Three others were hurt in the stampede to escape the second-story club.

The shooting made international headlines and led federal, state and local authorities to form a task force aimed at reducing violent crime in Little Rock. As of Oct. 1, police had recorded a 15 percent increase in homicides, aggravated assaults, rapes and robberies compared with the same ninemonth period last year.

Police have said much of the violence, from the nightclub shooting to Mashon Jackson’s death, has involved gang members.

In Mashon Jackson’s killing on Jan. 8, the first homicide of the year, a police spokesman identified him as a gang member but declined to identify the gang. Police said he was driving a Lincoln MKZ in the area of West 34th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive when two passengers exchanged gunfire with people in a white car.