On the morning of May 15, 2021, 87-year-old Lois Katherine Catte Hicks was shot and killed inside her apartment at the Three Corners Townhouses in Fort Smith, Arkansas. A neighbor heard shouting about 7:30 a.m.; when Hicks opened her door she saw 26-year-old Zachary Arnold armed with a semi-automatic rifle, tried to retreat, and was pursued and shot multiple times. She was pronounced dead inside her home.

Arnold then fired at neighboring apartments. A neighbor retrieved a hunting rifle, confronted Arnold, and fatally shot him. Authorities later reported Arnold was a veteran who had been taking medication for PTSD and had recently stopped treatment; his family had received unsettling messages from him beforehand. The county prosecutor found the neighbor’s use of deadly force justified and no arrests were made in Hicks’s death.

Hicks was born October 14, 1933, in Phoenix, Arizona, and was a mother, grandmother of eight, great-grandmother of fifteen, and member of Faith United Methodist Church; she was preceded in death by her husband Gilbert and their son Greg. Did anyone in the Fort Smith area know Lois or have information about what they saw that morning?