Jefferson Co. Looking for Leads in Six Murders

"He used to make a lot of noise, a lot of noise. We'd say 'Donnell stop.' I miss him a whole bunch," says Jacque Robinson. She's talking about 20-year-old Donnell Eason, Jr.

Eason used to play ball with the other young men at the Merrill Community Center, until March 31st, when his body was found at the intersection outside the center shot to death. His car found burning near the city limits. Eason's is only one of six unsolved murders in the county.

Robinson says, "It's not worth putting the families through what they've got to go through, the friends, the whole town. And they think it's just that one person and it's not. It affects a whole lot of people. And I wish they understood that."

Robinson knows the pain murder leaves behind; her own son was shot to death. That's why she spends her time with the young men at the Merrill Center, hoping to show them how permanent and senseless that kind of violence is, and giving them a place to vent when they feel the pressures of growing up, building up.

Robinson explains, "I'd rather for them to come here, play, talk to me, get it all of their chest, go in there and play a good game of ball, feel better, go home and take a bath and go to bed, get ready for school, work, what have you."

Neither Robinson nor the police know why Eason was killed. She just hopes someone comes forward with the information to put his killer, and others, in jail.

Two other murders this year in Pine Bluff are still unsolved.
And outside city limits, Jefferson County authorities are looking for information in three murders dating as far back as 2005.