WALDRON -- A Scott County man received a 40-year prison sentence Monday after a Scott County Circuit Court jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the February 2014 stabbing and slashing death of a rural Waldron man.
Circuit Judge Jerry Don Ramey followed the recommendation of the six-woman, six-man jury in sentencing Joshua Beyard, 24. The jury convicted Beyard earlier in the day of the gruesome death of 60-year-old Tou Lor in his home east of Waldron.
Deputy prosecutor Marcus Vaden told jurors that if they sentenced Beyard to 40 years in prison, he would be eligible for parole after serving 70 percent of the sentence, or 28 years.
He asked the jury to sentence Beyard to life in prison without parole because of the savagery of the murder.
"This was a completely senseless and brutal crime," he said.
In a jury impact statement read before sentencing, Lor's adopted daughter Yua Lor of Minnesota said the jury's conviction, support she and her family received from the local community, and those who were involved in attempts to save Lor and bring Beyard to justice had removed the fear she felt when she arrived in Waldron for the trial.
She said her family is Hmong from Laos.
She told Beyard that her father was a simple, God-fearing man who did not see the evil in Beyard, but it was his kindness that led him to let Beyard into his home.
Family and friends of Lor and of Beyard attended the three-day trial, often filling the courtroom. When the verdict was read convicting Beyard of first-degree murder, his mother, Rhoda Beyard, shook as she suppressed tears; his father, Doug Beyard, bowed low on the bench.
Lor's wife, Xee Lor, testified during the trial that Joshua Beyard had knocked on their locked door on the night of Feb. 9. When Tou Lor answered the door, Beyard asked to use the phone so he could call his mother for a ride home.
Beyard told the Lors the call did not go through, although he actually called a friend's phone and hung up. Handing the phone back through the partially open door, he asked to be let inside because it was cold.
Lor let him in, unlatching a security chain on the door. When he got inside, Xee Lor said, Beyard pulled out a knife and attacked her husband, inflicting wounds to his neck and stabbing and slashing him multiple times on his face, chest, hand and back.
Investigators never recovered a weapon.
Xee Lor said she ran out the back door and called for help. Investigators believe smears of Tou Lor's blood on light switches in the home were evidence that Beyard searched the home so he could kill Xee Lor, the eyewitness to her husband's murder.
Later, after he was arrested when his mother called authorities three hours later, Beyard told investigators that he stabbed Lor in self-defense because Lor attacked him in the belief Beyard was trying to rob them.
Xee Lor had testified her husband never attacked Beyard.
Beyard had told others different stories before his arrest about what happened: that an Asian attacked him on the rural road near the home of a friend he had been visiting and that he stabbed the man, and that three to four Asians attacked him on the road and he stabbed one
One of Beyard's attorneys, David Dunagin of Fort Smith, argued to jurors that his client acted in self-defense and that the attack on him by Lor left him shaken and depressed. Doug Beyard testified he had never seen his son so sad, and his brother Michael Beyard testified he locked his bedroom door so Joshua Beyard would not have access to the weapons inside.
Dunagin suggested to jurors that Beyard was guilty of manslaughter, or killing recklessly, because he went overboard in his effort to defend himself.
But Prosecuting Attorney Tom Tatum II suggested the reason Beyard was so upset was because he knew he was going to prison for a long time. He called Tou Lor's death one of the most violent and brutal killings he'd ever seen.
He argued to jurors that Beyard's actions spoke louder than his words, referring to the large number of bloody wounds Lor suffered compared with the three small cuts Beyard had on his hand and the varying stories he told.
NW News on 02/03/2015