Patrick Hollingsworth Watkins, 22, died late on November 21, 2015, after his 2014 Nissan Sentra veered off Interstate 20 in Bossier Parish and crashed near the 36-mile marker. Watkins was found dead in the driver’s seat with a gunshot wound to the head. A front-seat passenger survived a shoulder gunshot wound and was taken to a Shreveport hospital with injuries described at the time as non-life-threatening.

Witnesses said Watkins had been returning east from a casino in the Bossier City area with his mother, Dora Blake, in the back seat and another woman in the front. Blake told bystanders at the scene she had been kidnapped and had shot the others, but investigators determined her account did not match the evidence inside the car. Blake, then 47, was arrested and initially booked on first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder; prosecutors later charged her under Louisiana’s second-degree murder statute and with attempted second-degree murder for the surviving passenger.

On May 23, 2017, Blake pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Watkins’s death; the state agreed not to seek habitual-offender sentencing and dismissed the attempted-murder charge. On June 27, 2017, the judge imposed a 40-year sentence at hard labor for manslaughter, and the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction and sentence on April 11, 2018. If anyone knew Patrick or has information about the crash or events leading up to it, please share what is known.