A North Little Rock man was acquitted Tuesday of kidnapping his fiancee but was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $5,000 for beating and choking the woman, then stealing her car last year.
The sentence for aggravated assault on a family member, theft and third-degree domestic battery makes Sequoya Kimble immediately parole eligible.
The 24-year-old will be given an opportunity to pay off the fine in installments after he's released from custody.
After the Pulaski County jury rendered its verdict, Circuit Judge Barry Sims barred Kimble from ever again contacting Lauren Deshea Bell.
The 23-year-old woman was the victim of Kimble's "violent jealous rage," which had been building since he discovered a former boyfriend had texted her a flirty message while the couple were spending a day at the lake, prosecutors said.
Bell had tried to calm him down, but his rage flared after she repeatedly refused to let him look through her Facebook messages to see if other men had contacted her, the prosecutors said, showing jurors photographs of the woman with her eyes blackened and her face swollen.
"All that rage inside of him, he took it out on Lauren," deputy prosecutor Melissa Brown told jurors, reminding them that Kimble had once claimed to love Bell so much that he would call her his wife even though they were not married.
Prosecutors repeatedly drew jurors' attention to the photos, taken by sheriff's deputies three days after Bell was released from the hospital.
Kimble denied being the aggressor, telling jurors that he is a "peaceful man" who abhorred violence but that he'd been provoked by Bell when she hit him first during a September 2016 argument at their R&R Circle home.
Deputy prosecutor Jacob DeYoung scoffed at the idea that Kimble had been protecting himself when he was hitting and choking Bell.
"The evidence of Sequoya Kimble's crimes are all over Lauren Bell's face," DeYoung said. "What kind of peaceful man is going to do that? This isn't self-defense. This is a beating."
Defense attorney Paul Herrod asked jurors to reject the kidnapping charge since Bell's accusations didn't involve "classic" abduction-style crime, like the Lindbergh kidnapping. He cast the conflict between the pair as more about the way their troubled relationship worked than serious criminal offenses.
The photographs of Bell's injured face were disturbing, Herrod conceded, but he questioned whether the pictures proved anything more than the couple had been in a fight.
"Was she really kidnapped? Was it [the car] really stolen? Or was it just their way of dealing with each other," he said in his closing statement.
Disputes between domestic partners can escalate quickly, Herrod said.
"I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that either of them intended for it to end up the way it did," he said. "Once you start it, it takes on a life of its own. I don't know how but it does. It takes two to tango."
With Kimble facing a potential 16-year prison sentence, Herrod suggested that six years might be appropriate. He also asked the jury to impose a fine commensurate with the financial loss Kimble's victim suffered.
Bell told jurors that Kimble gripped her throat so tightly during the attack that she started seeing spots before her eyes and hear ringing in her ears.
"He was throttling me, and I couldn't breathe," she said. "I loved him so much, and I'm getting the crap beaten out of me. I'm thinking this is it, I'm going to die."
She told jurors she never laid a hand on Kimble, saying he attacked her when, in response to how he was berating her, she called him a monster.
"As soon as I let the word monster out of my mouth, I get hit," she said, describing how the blow knocked her to the ground.
Kimble followed that blow with a flurry of strikes and kicks while she was down, Bell said. He continued the pummelling as she tried to crawl away from him, she testified.
Her eyes were swollen almost closed by the time Kimble was done with her, she said. He left her bleeding from the mouth and nose, and so battered that she couldn't see straight, Bell told jurors.
Kimble left her without a phone when he took her car, Bell said, explaining that she had to contact her mother over the Internet so her mother would come get her and take her to the hospital.
In his testimony, Kimble said he'd choked Bell during a previous altercation but had put his hands on her throat during the second fight only because she was coming at him.
"It seems like I was defending myself," he said. "In my defense, she lunged ... and my arms went right for her neck."
Kimble denied all of the accusations related to the kidnapping charge, that he had held her prisoner so he could beat on her. He said he never held her down or cracked one of the bedroom walls by throwing her against it.
Not only could she have left any time, both of them were in and out of the room during their argument and struggle, Kimble told jurors.
He denied deliberately stealing Bell's car, saying he'd gone for a drive to clear his head with the intention of driving to California.
"What was going through my mind was trying to get away from a situation I'd been trying to get away from for some time," Kimble testified.
Kimble said he changed his mind in Arizona and was about to return to Arkansas when he was arrested near Flagstaff, four days after Bell was attacked.
Asked whether he wanted to apologize to her, Kimble said his only regret is that he "let [the] conflict go so far."
"I don't know if I could, truthfully [apologize]," Kimble told the 10 women and two men on the jury. "For the severity of the beating that occurred, that was not her fault. I went too far."
Metro on 10/26/2017