She Watched Him Kill Her Mother. The DA Let Him Out First.

0:01 Imagine this. You are five years old, and you already know how to read a room. Not because someone taught you. Because you had to. Because the house you grew up in was the kind of house where the energy could shift without warning, where loud meant something specific, where quiet meant something else entirely, and where you learned, before you could spell your own name, that your safety depended on your ability to feel the difference. You grew up in Las Vegas. Not the Las Vegas people see in movies. Not the Strip, not the lights, not the spectacle. The Las Vegas behind all of that. The neighborhoods where people are working double shifts and the lights get cut off anyway.

0:43 Where you do your homework by candlelight and wash your clothes in the bathtub with shampoo. And you don't tell anyone at school because that is just how it is. And you already know that some things stay inside the house. Your mother is everything to you. She is young and beautiful and magnetic and she is your best friend in the real estate sense of the word. She takes you everywhere. You are her Rd. dog. You go where she goes. And that means you see things that children were not built to process. Men coming and going trips that were explained one way and meant something else entirely. A candy apple green car with the words CANDY girl written across the back window in cursive that you thought was just because your Mama loved her car until you were old enough to understand it wasn't about the car at all.

1:33 You absorb all of it. You file it away. You build your normal out of what you have. And then a man comes into your life. He has been there since you were five. He braids your hair before school. He teaches you to cook. He puts his gun in your hand when he goes out and tells you that you know what to do with it. He is cold in a way that is hard to name but impossible to miss, quiet in a way that makes a room feel smaller. You love him when you are little because that is what children do with the adults who show up for them. And as you get older, something shifts and you can feel it, and you do not have the language for it yet, but your body already knows.

2:16 You are 15 years old. And one morning you are home alone with him, and your mother is at work, and he has kept you home for a reason. And when you understand what that reason is, something in you goes completely still. Not frozen with fear, still with survival. This is no tears for black girls. I'm Samantha Paul. Before we go any further, this episode contains detailed accounts of child sexual assault, domestic violence, murder witnessed at close range, and compounded loss that spans nearly a decade. There is no gentle way to carry this story, but there is a right way and that is the only way we are going to do it.

3:02 Please take care of yourself while you listen. Her name is Davina Layal. She is alive. She chose to let her story be told, and we are going to honor that by telling it with the full weight it deserves. Not sanitized, not sensationalized, but true. Davina grew up in Las Vegas. Her childhood was built on love and chaos in equal measure. Her mother, Josie Kate Jones, was her person, the one constant in a life that had very few of them. Josie was young when she was raising Davina, barely older than a girl herself in some of those early years, and she was navigating her own complicated survival while trying to give her daughter something that felt like stability. She kept Davina fed.

3:49 Her hair was always done, her outfits were always cute. Josie made sure of that, even when the money was tight and the circumstances were not what they should have been. But Josie was also in a life that pulled her in directions, that left her daughter in the care of people she didn't know, in environments that weren't safe, inside patterns of men and money and survival that Davina grew up watching and normalizing before she ever understood what she was watching. The man who became Davina's stepfather had been in her life since she was five years old. His name was Leonard Woods. He came in as her mother's boyfriend, assumed the role of stepfather by virtue of never leaving, and occupied that space in Davina's life for a decade. He taught her practical things.

4:37 He showed up in practical ways. And he was also, as court records and Davina's own testimony would later confirm, a predator who had been watching her in the most violating way imaginable for years. Hundreds of photographs were recovered from Leonard Woods's phone. Davina photographed without her knowledge or consent, through windows and doors, in bathrooms, in bedrooms, across multiple homes, across multiple years. He would position himself outside wherever she was in the house, under the pretense of smoking, and he would watch her and photograph her and she had no idea. There was one time she saw something move past a window while she was in the bathroom, and it scared her badly enough that she ran to her mother.

5:26 Woods was the one who dismissed it. He was there. He was the thing that moved. And she didn't know that until she sat in a lawyer's office years later and was shown a computer screen full of images that locked into place. A decade of feeling like something was wrong without being able to name it. On July 18th, 2015, Leonard Woods kept Davina home from work with her mother. He was unusually warm that morning. He made breakfast. He moved differently than he normally moved. She noticed it because you notice when a cold person gets warm, it means something is coming. He told her he had seen her taking a photo of herself in a sports bra through her bedroom window.

6:11 He said he would tell her mother unless she showed herself to him. She was 15 years old. In the moment that followed, Davina Layal did something that most adults would not have been able to do. She calculated. She understood that if she fought him, if she showed fear, if she gave him any reason to feel threatened, this man who had pushed her mother downstairs, broken her mother's toe, told her mother he would kill her and burn the house down if she ever left him. This man would not stop at assault. She knew that in her body, before she could reason it in her head. So she went still. She let him do what he did. She took the money he handed her to buy her. Silence.

6:56 She went back to her room. She left her door open so he could hear her moving. She texted her best friend Devin, one word at a time, and deleted each message after she sent it. She waited. She walked out to the car that came for her without running, without looking back, without giving him a single signal that she was leaving to report him. She was 15. When Davina reached Devon's house, the police were called. Officers eventually came, took her statement, documented the assault, took photographs. By the time they went to the home to arrest Leonard Woods, he was at the end of the street, at a stop sign in his car, ready to flee.

7:40 They caught him. They booked him. They found the guns and there were several of them. Sawed offs, weapons with scratched off serial numbers, none of which Leonard Woods was legally allowed to possess because he was a convicted felon. They found them and they charged him. Leonard Woods was in custody for approximately 3 days, Three days, then the Clark County District Attorney's Office let him go. Public reporting described it as a paperwork error, an administrative issue in the processing of his case. But Davina and her mother had documented in those police reports that Woods had made explicit death threats, that he had said he would kill Josie and her children, that he was dangerous in a specific stated on record way that information existed.

8:29 It was in writing, and someone in the Clark County DA's office decided, through negligence or indifference or bureaucratic failure that a man with illegal weapons, felony possession charges, a sexual assault allegation and documented death threats against the woman he had been with for nearly a decade could walk back out into the world. He did. He called Josie, He threatened her more. She posted about her fear on Facebook. She moved. She took Davina to a new apartment on the other side of town. And for a brief stretch of days, maybe 3 or 4, it was just the two of them. No man in the house. Just Davina and her mother painting her bedroom, going to the movies, laughing in the car together, Josie doing everything she could to make her daughter feel something close to OK after what had happened to her.

9:21 Davina has said those were the best days of her life with her mother. They were also the last ones. The one thread they kept from their old life was Davina's school. She was a cheerleader. She did not want to lose that. She asked her mother not to make her change schools. Josie said yes. She drove Davina to cheer practice. She sat in the gym and watched her daughter practice, because that is what Josie Kate Jones did. She never missed a game, never missed a practice if she could help it. Leonard Woods was in the parking lot. He had followed them there.

10:02 He watched them leave. He followed them to the Walgreens at Tropicana Ave. and Decatur Blvd. a shopping center a few blocks southwest of the Las Vegas Strip. August 5th, 2015, eleven days after Josie had reported his assault on her daughter, 11 days after the DA's office handed him back his freedom, Josie and Davina walked out of the Walgreens. He came from between the parked cars. He stabbed Josie Kate Jones 16 times, in her chest, in her neck, in her stomach. Davina ran back into the store, screaming for help.

10:42 She hit the automatic doors before they could open. She begged the strangers at the register to do something. She ran back outside and her mother was on the ground, curled in on herself. Blood soaked through her purple shirt so completely that the fabric couldn't hold it anymore. Her eyes unfocused, her body rigid, choking, Davina got down next to her mother and told her, please don't leave me, you are all I have. Josie Kate Jones was taken by ambulance. Her daughter was not allowed to ride with her. Davina found out her mother was dead from a detective who opened the car door and said it plainly, right there at the crime scene, sometime after two in the morning. Nobody held her.

11:26 Leonard Woods drove away from the Walgreens and surrendered to police just after midnight. He told officers he had been involved in an incident at the store. In a recorded jailhouse phone call that was later played at his trial, He told someone on the other end of the line that he had done something to Josie and did not think she was going to make it. He had told Josie Kate Jones he would find her. He found her that night. A 15 year old girl who had survived a sexual assault three weeks earlier and just watched her mother be murdered, was transported to a state facility, photographed for intake, stripped of her clothing, stripped of her phone, handed clothes from a shared bin, placed in a room with strangers at 3:00 in the morning, and had her photograph taped to the door. The door closed.

12:16 No one hugged her. No one told her she was going to be OK. No one sat with her. Davina has described lying on top of the blanket in that room, not wanting to touch anything, not knowing if she slept, just staring in silence at a ceiling she didn't recognize, in a building she hadn't chosen, carrying a weight that no child should ever have been asked to carry alone. This is where I want to stop and name something. Clearly, the man who murdered Josie Kate Jones was Leonard Ray Woods. He is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole following a March 2019 conviction. The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that the jury deliberated less than 20 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.

13:03 The evidence included surveillance footage, the recorded jailhouse call, the photographs recovered from his phone and the testimony of Davina Leal, who sat in that courtroom on her mother's birthday and told jurors she still had nightmares where she could hear the knife going in and out and hear her mother screaming. Justice was eventually served for Josie Kate Jones, but justice was not served. In the 11 days between Leonard Woods's release and that parking lot, the Clark County District Attorney's Office made a decision or failed to make one, and Josie Kate Jones paid for it with her life. The man who held that office in August of 2015 was Steve Wolfson. He has been the Clark County District Attorney since 2012. He is still the Clark County District Attorney today. As of early 2026, he is running for a fourth term, unopposed, with a campaign war chest of over $1 million. There is no record of any public accountability statement from his office specifically addressing the early release of Leonard Woods and the murder that followed 11 days later. Davina Leal was 15 years old when she wrote in a police report that Leonard Woods had threatened to kill her mother. She was 15 when that report was filed. She was 15 when the DA's office let him go anyway. She was 15 when she watched him make good on his promise. She is still waiting for someone

14:34 in a position of power to say plainly that what happened was wrong and that it will not happen again. That is the first murder that bookends Davina's story. The years between that August night and what comes next were not empty years. They were years of loss, compounding on loss in a way that should not be humanly survivable. The first love of her life, a young man she had known since they were both 14, was shot and killed during a drug transaction he had nothing to do with. He was trying to protect someone else. He died doing what he always did, which was show up. His family, who had taken Davina in and made her their own, became the only family she had. She grieved with them and they held each other up. He was the first person who had known her whole story and loved her anyway, and losing him meant losing the only witness to who she was before August 5th, 2015.

15:35 Then her aunt and uncle, the first two people who showed up for her the night her mother was killed. The people who functioned as her second parents died in a murder suicide. Losing them meant losing the last people who had chosen to come for her that night, the last living proof that someone had seen her in her worst moment and decided she was worth showing up for. 3 losses in less than four years, each one violent, each one sudden, each one arriving before the last one had finished breaking her. She spiraled. She used substances the way people in pain use them, not to get high, but to get through.

16:17 She was running toward broken people because broken people felt like home. She knew what she was doing. She said so herself. She called herself, painfully self aware. She knew it was wrong, and she did it anyway because the alternative was feeling everything and she was not ready for that. But she never let her life fall apart entirely. Whatever was burning on the inside the surface stayed functional. She kept her money together, she kept her commitments. She showed up for what needed to be shown up for, and slowly, over time, she started pulling herself back towards something. And then she met Charles.

16:58 Charles Lovelady Junior was 28 years old. He was a Detroit native who had planted himself in Indianapolis and built something real there. He and his father, Charles Lovelady Senior Co, owned a restaurant called Chuck's Coney Island at 29 to 32 E 20th St. They had brought Detroit style and Detroit love to an Indianapolis neighborhood. And the community responded. The restaurant had gone viral. People loved it. Charles was the kind of man who held community events just because he wanted to, who passed things out and never expected anything in return, who his sister Kendia described as a gentle soul who was loved by everyone in that neighborhood. He was also deeply ambitious.

17:44 He owned rental properties. He was in talks about purchasing a daycare. He had A to do list as his phone screensaver every morning so he could see exactly what he needed to accomplish before the day was done. He was 28 years old and already building a legacy. He had pursued Davina for four years before she said yes. She wasn't ready. She had buried love once and it had nearly buried her. But he never stopped. He just kept being who he was. Patient, consistent, present. And one day she was scrolling Facebook out of boredom and saw that he was driving down her St. and she messaged him and he asked her out and she said yes. Six months they were together.

18:30 Every single day. They woke up together, cooked together, prayed together, went to the gym together. She described going to sleep, thinking about him and waking up still talking. He was her best friend, her protector. The moon and the stars, she said in her eyes. On her 25th birthday, he told her he loved her. At the table in front of both their families, his mother thought he was about to propose. Everyone was laughing and crying, and it was, in Davina's words, the most magical day of her life. She said if she could live any single day on a loop for the rest of her existence, it would be that one, surrounded by everyone who loved them both, laughing, eating, just alive.

19:17 It was October 2024. It was also the last month of his life. On October 12th, 2024, Davina and Charles left Sunset, a bar on West 16th St. in Indianapolis, just after three in the morning. They had their food. They were going home to watch television. They were happy. According to Fox 59 News, they were at a stoplight at Indiana Ave. and University Ave. when a vehicle pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Davina described it starting like fireworks. She was leaned over the center console talking to him when she felt something hit her in the back and burn. She told him she had been hit.

20:02 He wrapped his arm around her and pushed her head down and he drove. He drove fast and they kept shooting the car, taking hit after hit. Charles trying to get her to a hospital with bullets still coming and then she sat up for a moment and they looked at each other. She said she had never seen a grown man look so scared. And then he was gone. He was shot once. The bullet entered his lower right back and traveled up and struck his heart. He was 6 foot three. He was 255 lbs. He was everything, and he slumped back over the seat and he was looking at her and she could hear the air leaving his body. And that sound has not left her since. She ran on a broken foot down a dark Indianapolis street at 3:00 in the morning, screaming for help. She flagged down an ambulance.

20:53 She fought her way through the hospital, trying to get them to focus on him instead of her. She called his mother before she called her own. His family confirmed publicly that Charles Lovelady Junior's firearm was in the car and had never been fired. This was not a gunfight. This was an ambush. His family believes it was a case of mistaken identity. A vehicle identical to his, same black Cadillac Escalade, same custom rims, same everything, belonged to someone in the area who had, according to family accounts, a significant bounty on his head. The only differences between the two vehicles were the length of the truck bed and the license plate.

21:34 They haunted the wrong man. Charles Lovelady Junior was 28 years old. He had a restaurant, and a foundation now bears his name. His sister painted his face on the side of a building on the east side of Indianapolis because she said she wanted his face Remembered forever. His father has kept their restaurant alive as a tribute, his mother established the Charles Lovelady Junior Foundation. His murder remains unsolved. If you have any information about the October 12th, 2024 murder of Charles Lovelady Junior in Indianapolis, please contact Crime Stoppers of Central IN at 317-262-8477.

22:17 A substantial reward has been offered by his family for information leading to an arrest. When Davina describes her life right now, she does not dress it up. She says she is not good to herself when no one is watching. That she will go days without eating, without showering, without moving, just staring at walls in the silence of a grief that does not behave the way the other griefs did. Because this time she says she never came back from that scene, that she does not know who she is anymore, that she is living in a kind of delusion where she keeps him alive in her mind because she cannot bring herself to fully release him. She is on five medications, 2 antipsychotics, an antidepressant, an anxiety medication, a mood stabilizer, prescription sedatives, every single night, because she has not fallen asleep naturally since October 12th, 2024. She is not suicidal.

23:16 She said that clearly she is tired, bone tired in a way that only people who have carried this much for this long can understand. She is also still here. And the fact that she is still here after everything that tried to take her out is not a small thing. It is not a detail, it is the whole point. The domestic violence system failed. Josie Kate Jones, when the Clark County D AS office released the man she had reported, the man who had threatened her life, the man who was armed and dangerous and on the record as such. Steve Wolfson's office made a decision and Josie died 11 days later. He has held that office for over a decade since he is running again.

24:04 And the question that nobody in Las Vegas seems to be asking loudly enough is what accountability looks like when a paperwork error costs a 41 year old woman her life in front of her 15 year old daughter. The child welfare system failed Davina Leal the night her mother died, when the state's response to a traumatized child was intake a photograph, a borrowed blanket and a closed door. The homicide investigation system is failing Charles Lovelady Junior right now. Every day his murder goes unsolved is a day a family waits and a community grieves and a young man's legacy hangs in the unresolved air of an unanswered question.

24:46 These are not separate failures. They are the same failure, wearing different faces in different decades, in different cities. The failure to treat Black women and the people they love as urgent, as protected, as worth the full weight of whatever the system has to offer. Davina Layal survived a sexual assault at 15. She buried her mother at 15. She was processed by the state like a case number at 15. She buried the first love of her life. She buried her aunt and her uncle. She survived being shot. She watched the man she was building a life with die in the seat next to her. And she got up the next morning and the morning after that, and she is still here, still talking, still refusing to disappear quietly into the losses that tried to take her. Her mother's name was Josie Kate Jones. She was 41 years old.

25:45 She was a dog groomer who loved her clients and never missed her daughter's games. She was someone's best friend before she was anyone's cautionary tale. She deserved to be protected by a system that had the information and the legal authority to protect her. His name was Charles Lovelady Junior, He was 28 years old. He was a businessman and a community pillar and a son and a brother and the love of a woman who had already lost everything and found something worth living for again. He deserved to come home that night. Say their names. If this episode brought anything up for you, please reach out. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

26:30 The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. You do not have to carry it alone. This is no tears for black girls. I'm Samantha Paul. Stay loved, stay safe, and remember whenever you're trapped in a World of Darkness, never allow fear to overwhelm you. Believe in your inner spirit and remind yourself of God's first words. Let there be light.