Annie Lee Walton, 66, was killed in a drive-by shooting at her home in the Palmetto community of Mississippi on December 7, 2018. The attack also wounded her grandson and three other people; authorities described the motive as drug-related. The suspect was 17-year-old Latavious Betts, who fled and was captured a week later in Tupelo and charged as an adult with murder and multiple counts of aggravated assault.

Court records and the family’s lawsuit say Betts had two prior 2018 arrests for shootings: a March murder charge from a Verona car wash incident and a July aggravated assault charge after another shooting that injured two people. According to the family, administrative errors and a failure to communicate Betts’s prior murder charge allowed him to secure release on bond before Annie Walton’s killing. The Waltons sued the city of Verona and its police chief for wrongful death, alleging gross negligence; the Fifth Circuit of Appeals later dismissed that suit on sovereign immunity grounds.

Betts pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Walton’s death and to aggravated assault; a judge sentenced him in February 2021 to 40 years in prison, with a 20-year suspended sentence and five years of probation for the assault. Did anyone in Palmetto or Verona know Annie Walton or have information about Betts’s movements in late 2018?