LR man guilty in threat to trooper’s wife, judge finds

A 28-year-old Little Rock man faces up to six years in prison with his conviction Monday for threatening the life of a woman, the wife of a state trooper with whom he’d been feuding.

Arick Marquett Johnson denied the first-degree terroristic-threatening charge but told Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright that he was on Julia Holley’s street, driving a yellow Hummer like she described, on May 27, 2013.

Johnson testified he didn’t know Holley and had never spoken to her, but acknowledged on cross-examination that he had posted photographs of the couple’s Otter Creek subdivision home on Facebook with disparaging remarks about the trooper, Isaac “Ben” Holley, 28.

Johnson’s attorney, Lee Short, argued that the trooper, called as a defense witness, had put his wife up to framing Johnson because his client had made numerous complaints to law enforcement and federal housing authorities about how Ben Holley had treated him when the trooper was a security guard at the Wimbledon Green apartments on Wimbledon Green Circle in Little Rock.

“He called her to do that,” Short argued. “She didn’t do that on her own.”

None of Johnson’s accusations came to anything, and he complained on the witness stand that his complaints didn’t seem to have been thoroughly investigated.

Short asked the judge to consider how long Julia Holley took in notifying Little Rock police about what happened that day — five hours — in assessing her credibility. The attorney said if she’d really been threatened in front of her children like she said, she would have called police much sooner.

Short also asked the judge to consider that Ben Holley told investigators that he had once told Johnson, while the defendant was using his cellphone to record video of an encounter between the men, that he could have mistaken his cellphone for a pistol and killed him.

Deputy prosecutor Michael Wright told the judge that the only reason Johnson admitted to being in the neighborhood was because he knew he had been recorded on security cameras in the area.

The prosecutor argued that, with no evidence that the trooper had done anything wrong, what went on between Ben Holley and Johnson had no bearing on whether Johnson was guilty.

“The case is not about the problems between Mr. Johnson and Trooper Holley,” Wright said. “She [Julia Holley] has been very clear about what happened and she’s identified him.”

The judge disallowed the accusations that Johnson had been framed, saying that while Ben Holley might have a motive to frame Johnson, there was no evidence that he’d done so.

Both the trooper and his wife denied any wrongdoing, and the judge, who decided the case without a jury, said that the question of Johnson’s guilt hinged on whether he believed Julia Holley, which he did.

Sentencing on the charge, a Class D felony, is scheduled for March 5.

Julia Holley, 29, told the judge she was “100 percent” sure Johnson was the man who drove up to her yelling threats to kill her. She said the Hummer had driven quickly towards her 4-year-old daughter before suddenly pulling up next to her so closely that she was less than an arm’s length away.

“He said, ‘I’ll kill you, b****!’ and held up his hand [like he was holding a gun] and said ‘ boom boom,’” Holley testified, while showing the judge how her assailant had mimicked aiming a pistol sideways. “I could touch the vehicle, if I had wanted to. That’s why I could describe him to a T.”

Holley said she never seen the man before and didn’t immediately realize why anyone would threaten her, but then recalled that her husband had problems with a tenant, whose name she didn’t know, at the apartments.

She said the Hummer had first come to her attention when it turned onto her street, with “bumping” music played so loudly she found it to be “aggressive.”

“It was really loud and uncomfortable,” she told the judge. “I felt threatened.”

Questioned about why she took so long to report the threat to police, Holley said she had consulted with her husband, but couldn’t quickly get ahold of him because he was in training. She called police after he told her to make a complaint, she said.