On Nov. 11, 2014, Brandon Wallace wanted to kill himself.
But he didn't, and now the question for a Pulaski County jury to decide is what the Sherwood man had planned for his estranged girlfriend that day.
The 32-year-old father of three is charged with kidnapping and aggravated assault, charges that carry up to 36 years in prison since he's accused of abducting the woman, a 35-year-old mother of four, at gunpoint in front of her toddler son from the home the couple once shared.
Deputy prosecutor Jayme Butts-Hall told jurors that Wallace took the woman on a two-hour ride to Cross County that ended on a dirt road near his grandparents' house near Parkin. There, she said, a ranting and raving Wallace terrorized the woman by firing his gun into the air before the woman could calm him and persuade Wallace not to kill her.
"She tells the defendant everything he wants to hear so she can get back home," Butts-Hall said.
He eventually drove the woman back to Sherwood and let her go, and she went to police.
But what prosecutors and police call an armed abduction, Wallace's attorneys, Lou Marczuk and Alan Jones, are arguing is a failed suicide attempt by a man intent on hurting only himself.
The lawyers maintain that Wallace was driven to despair by the fact that he'd essentially been barred from the family home and by the idea that he was about to lose everything he loved -- his children, his family, his job and his future. The defense begins presenting evidence at 9:30 a.m. today.
Regardless of their verdict, the six men and six women of the jury will not be told what brought Wallace to that brink -- the accusation that he had been molesting one of the woman's daughters, a 13-year-old girl, for at least two months. The girl had gone to police a few days earlier.
Deputy prosecutor Ashley Bowen said the accusations -- "the bread and butter" of the case against Wallace -- would show jurors why he lashed out so strongly against his former girlfriend.
But, acting on defense arguments, Circuit Judge Leon Johnson barred prosecutors from informing jurors about the accusations, which led to rape and sexual assault charges against Wallace.
Johnson agreed with the defense that the sex-crime charges are too inflammatory for jurors to hear, saying he didn't want jurors to jump to conclusions about whether Wallace was guilty of kidnapping.
"I don't want to get it in the jury's mind that just because he's charged with rape, he kidnapped her," the judge said in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday.
Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday after playing a 31-minute recorded statement Wallace gave to Sherwood police Sgt. Keith Wilson three days after driving the woman to Cross County.
On the recording, he expressed surprise that the woman had told police he had abducted her. Wallace said he wanted to tell the woman his side of the story and she went willingly, even though he was carrying his gun when he asked her.
"What I don't understand is why she is making it seem like I did all of this kidnapping and trying to torture her," Wallace said. "I was trying to show her this is the end of my life. I felt like she wanted to hear my side of the story or like she wanted to know how I feel. I told her, 'I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to tell you my story.'"
He told Wilson that police had arrested him before he could kill himself, and described how he had purchased the revolver with that intention.
"I said ... I will just take myself out of this, out of the picture, out of their life," he said. "I was down, man ... way past depressed. I'm losing my life as a human being."
On the recording, edited to remove references to the sex-crime accusations, Wallace described how he approached the woman with the weapon in his hand, trying to assure her he meant her no harm.
"She was like 'Oh my God, please don't kill me.' I said 'this is not for you, this is for me,'" Wallace said. "I said 'we are going for a ride,' and she said OK."
He said he didn't kill himself when he was with the woman because she convinced him that she would stick with him.
"She promised me we can work through this, we will work through this together," Wallace said. "That's what I wanted to hear, us [together]."
Metro on 09/21/2016