Just after 7 a.m. on January 25, 2012, 44-year-old Harry Ainsworth was shot to death while he tried to stop a carjacking in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Anita Hedgepeth told police she had noticed a young man nearby as she walked from her apartment to her car. After she got inside her car, she heard a tapping on the driver’s side window. She rolled the window down, and a man asked her the time. Then he pointed a gun at her head and demanded her car. Hedgepeth said she refused. The man again threatened her, and Hedgepeth said she got out of her car, clutching her purse. The man tried to grab it, and they struggled. Quickly, the man got inside her car. Hedgepeth said she screamed and then saw Ainsworth jump onto the hood of her car, smash the windshield with his feet and fists, and yell at the man to get out of the car.
Hedgepeth said she heard three shots. Ainsworth told her to run, and then he collapsed across the street, where he died in front of his two young children. The assailant left the car and ran.
Hedgepeth described the shooter as a Black man wearing khaki pants, a fleece hoodie, and a cap. Jeremy Ballard, who called 911, tracked the assailant for a short while and described him as a Black male wearing a brown leather jacket, tan pants, and black Boxer shorts.
The New Orleans Police Department later released a composite sketch that described the assailant as a Black man in his 20s, around 5’6” to 5’8” tall, and weighing 140 to 150 pounds. During the initial investigation, the police received several Crime Stoppers calls suggesting that 17-year-old Kendall Harrison, who lived part of the time a few blocks from the incident, was the person in the sketch.
The police obtained a search warrant to obtain DNA from Harrison, and the sample was sent to the Louisiana State Crime Laboratory for analysis and comparison against samples taken from the steering wheel of Hedgepeth’s car.
Police arrested Harrison on February 28, 2012, charging him with murder and armed robbery. During a search of Harrison’s other residence, in the New Orleans suburb of Harvey, police said they found khaki pants, a black sweatshirt with a gray hood, and a fitted cap.
Harrison’s trial began in June 2012 in Orleans Parish District Court.
Neither Hedgepeth nor Ballard had been able to identify Harrison as the assailant, but they each testified about the events of that morning.
Although the state lacked an eyewitness, its case included several witnesses who testified that Harrison was in the area around the time of the carjacking.
Nyron Harrison, a cousin of Harrison’s, lived in Harvey but said that much of his family lived on Vallette Street, about three blocks from the carjacking. He said that on the morning of the incident, he was doing some repairs on that property at about 8 a.m. when Harrison stopped by. He remembered the day because of all the police cars in the neighborhood. Nyron also testified that Detective Tanisha Sykes, the lead investigator on the case, took his statement and threatened to charge him as an accessory if he did not testify about Kendall’s involvement in the shooting.
Rosemary Harrison, a great aunt, testified that Harrison called her between 7:20-7:45 a.m. on January 25, 2012, and said that he needed a ride. She said she picked him about three blocks from the shooting.
Meredith Acosta, a firearms examiner with the police department, testified that she examined shell casings and copper jacket fragments and other evidence at the crime scene, as well as a bullet retrieved from Ainsworth during the autopsy. She said that it was her opinion that the shooter used a 9 mm semi-automatic gun. Police never recovered a weapon.
Jeremy Dubois, a DNA analyst with the Acadiana Crime Laboratory in New Iberia, testified that he performed testing on the car’s steering wheel and the blouse that Hedgepeth wore that morning.
He said that the steering wheel contained DNA profiles consistent with Hedgepeth and Kendall Harrison. Dubois said the probability that the male DNA was from someone other than Harrison was one in 73.7 million for the Black population.
Joshua McReynolds testified that he shared a cell with Harrison at the Orleans Parish Prison in June 2012. At the time, McReynolds was charged with armed robbery. McReynolds said that Harrison told him that he had shot a man while carjacking a woman. He said Harrison referred to the crime as the “good Samaritan murder,” which was how the media described the incident.
McReynolds said Harrison questioned him about DNA evidence and said that he had wiped down the car but might have left a cigarette butt nearby. McReynolds said he asked Harrison about what it felt like to kill a man, and Harrison answered that it was like shooting a bird with a BB gun.
By the time of the trial, McReynolds had pled guilty to armed robbery and received a 20-year prison sentence.
Harrison did not testify. His father, Michael Willis, testified that Kendall had been missing a front tooth for several years, and the judge asked Harrison to stand and display his mouth for the jurors. None of the descriptions of the gunman mentioned a missing tooth.
A non-unanimous jury convicted Harrison, now 20 years old, of second-degree murder and armed robbery on December 8, 2014. He received a sentence of life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 45 years, for the murder conviction, and a concurrent sentence of 45 years in prison on the armed-robbery conviction.
Harrison appealed, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and that the trial judge had erred in denying challenges to two jurors who appeared to say during jury selection that they might factor in a defendant’s decision not to testify during deliberations.
On March 21, 2018, the Fourth Circuit of the Louisiana Court of Appeal affirmed Harrison’s conviction, but it also ordered Harrison to be resentenced because the trial judge didn’t follow proper sentencing procedures for convictions that involved a firearm enhancement or for defendants younger than 18 years old at the time of the crime.
Harrison was resentenced on December 3, 2018, with his prison sentence largely unchanged. The trial court maintained the sentence of life in prison for the conviction of second-degree murder but removed the parole restriction. On the armed-robbery conviction, Harrison still received 45 years, which now included five years for the firearm enhancement.
On January 4, 2019, Harrison filed a notice of appeal. After receiving approval from the trial court, he filed his motion with the appellate court on February 10, 2021.
A year earlier, the United States Supreme Court had struck down the use of non-unanimous verdicts in felony trials, which were only allowed in Oregon and Louisiana at the time. The court’s ruling only applied to future cases and those still on direct appeal. (Oregon has since extended the ruling retroactively.)
In its response, the state argued that Harrison’s conviction and sentence had become final, which barred him from receiving a new trial.
On January 12, 2022, the Fourth Circuit of the Louisiana Court of Appeal granted Harrison a new trial. It said that Harrison’s conviction hadn’t become final, because the appeal of his resentencing was still under court review.
Harrison remained in jail for more than three years awaiting a retrial, which took place in early September 2025. He was now represented by attorney Scott Sherman.
This time, McReynolds did not testify. Neither did Harrison.
The state again presented DNA evidence, but the Louisiana crime laboratory had backpedaled from its original findings. Its new analysis of the genetic material found on the steering wheel said there were three contributors, Hedgepeth plus two minor contributors. The probability of the minor contributor that the state said was Harrison being from some other Black male had increased to one in 123,000.
Sherman told the New Orleans Advocate that that the DNA test results were “by far the weakest match value I have ever seen.”
The jury acquitted Harrison on September 11, 2025. He was released from jail that day.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 09-26-2025
