Capital murder trial begins in 2017 homicides

A’Laylaih Fisher’s killer stabbed the 5-year-old Little Rock girl more than 20 times then tried to saw off her head. Her 4-year-old brother, Elijah Fisher, was the next to die, stabbed 14 times before he was decapitated, prosecutors told a Pulaski County jury on Wednesday.

Their mother, 24-year-old Mariah Cunningham, was forced to watch her children tortured before she too was killed, stabbed more than 30 times during the December 2017 attack at the family’s apartment in Little Rock, senior deputy prosecutor Barbara Mariani said.

Based on video surveillance, authorities estimated it took only 20 minutes to “annihilate” mother and children, Mariani told jurors in opening statements at the capital-murder trial of 26-year-old Michael Ivory Collins.

Mariani and chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson will resume presenting evidence at 9 a.m. today before Circuit Judge Herb Wright.

Collins’ half-brother, William Burnell Alexander, 23, is charged with him and due to stand trial next month. Prosecutors said Alexander restrained Cunningham while Collins killed her children.

Robbery was the motive, although all the killers got was a TV, an X-Box video-game console and Cunningham’s broken-down Honda, a vehicle they quickly abandoned, Mariani told the seven women and five men of the jury. Collins thought she had money for some reason, she said.

The children’s deaths were “designed to cause the most unimaginable terror,” the prosecutor told. “All because she couldn’t give him what he wanted.”

Collins, a former roommate of the family’s, was identified as a suspect shortly after the bodies were discovered due to the “methodical” police work of detective Terry McDaniel, the prosecutor said. McDaniel also discovered Collins fled to Chicago and was able to direct U.S. marshals to the home where he was staying.

Federal agents found Collins asleep on the couch, with his Adidas sneakers — spattered with the blood of all three victims — on the floor next him. The family had been dead for five days by then.

But much of what prosecutors know about what happened in the house comes from what happened next, Mariani said. In federal custody, Collins shared a cell with a Tennessee bank robber named Marino Bernard Scott, 47.

About six months after the killings, Scott contacted authorities to volunteer as a witness. He told investigators things only the killer could know, details deliberately kept from the press, and all of it came from Collins, his cellmate, the prosecutor said.