On the morning of Wednesday, March 27, a Little Rock man was shot in the parking lot of the Hillary Clinton Children’s Library. An internal email sent by the Central Arkansas Library System to employees the next day revealed that the shooter appeared to be the man’s 11-year-old son.
The email described the scene this way:
A little before 9am Wednesday, two children and an adult were in a parked vehicle on the lot at Children’s Library waiting for the library to open, when a gun inside the car was fired, striking the adult.
One staff member was sitting in her car near the vehicle when the gun went off. She heard the gunshot and then one of the kids opened the driver’s door and got out of the car. This boy had been driving the vehicle when it pulled up. He and a younger girl came into the library and asked that someone call 9-1-1 and the boy stated that he had shot his father.
The father, Ahmad Waheed, survived after being taken to UAMS. He faces criminal charges for what happened on March 27. But so does his son, according to a police report and an affidavit for Waheed’s arrest warrant, dated April 3. The 11-year-old boy was charged with first-degree domestic battery and possession of a handgun by a minor.
Police and court records paint a grim picture of the family conditions that led to the shooting.
Waheed, 43, has a long criminal history that includes domestic violence, assault and years of substance abuse. As a felon, he was barred from legally owning a gun, but that did not prevent him from having a loaded gun in the car on March 27.
Logs of 911 calls from the family home reveal that Waheed’s erratic, alarming behavior prompted his young son to call for help multiple times.
Little Rock Police Department reports over the past two years include at least five instances where officers contacted the Arkansas Department of Human Services about the children and at least two times where DHS took the children away from Waheed since December 2022.
But on the morning of the shooting, Waheed seems to have been the sole adult responsible for his 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter. The boy later told police that when “his dad is high, he makes him drive the vehicle,” according to the police report for the March 27 shooting.
Pulaski County Prosecutor Will Jones said he was unable to comment on his office’s decision to charge Waheed’s son or whether the charges were still being pursued. “All the juvenile charging decisions are sealed by law,” he said.
John Wesley Hall, a criminal defense attorney in Little Rock, said that juvenile court is much less punitive than adult criminal court and can be a way of providing services to at-risk children. “Maybe it’s for the sake of forcing some sort of psychological treatment,” Hall said upon being told the details of the case by the Arkansas Times. “The kid’s going to have trauma from this.”
Based on the circumstances, the chances of the boy going to jail were “slim to none,” Hall said. “This has all the marks of being an accident.”
But because juvenile records aren’t publicly available, there’s no way to tell what has become of his case.
March 27
It’s not clear why Waheed’s two children weren’t in school that morning. The family’s car, a 2003 green Ford Expedition, was in the library parking lot before the 9 a.m. opening.
A woman who was there with her 2-year-old grandchild told a 911 dispatcher the 11-year-old boy was upset and eager to get help for his dad. The boy can be heard in the audio recording of the 911 call saying the shooting was an accident.
According to an affidavit for Waheed’s arrest warrant, police arrived on the scene at 9:02 a.m. and found Waheed “inside a Ford SUV with an apparent gunshot wound to the torso.” After administering medical attention, detectives “located the juvenile son of Mr. Waheed, [name redacted], and took him into custody and located a handgun in his right front pocket.”
A police report says the boy told officers that his dad was “high on sherm again” and that he knows when his father is high because he “will start stuttering and not making sense.”
The boy said his father had become agitated and was “grabbing on his [the boy’s] face” and the boy fired the gun “so it would hit the door to get his dad to move back away from him.” Instead, the bullet hit his father in the “left side of his chest near the bottom of his armpit,” according to the report. His sister was in the backseat of the vehicle at the time. He also told officers that he did not mean to shoot his father and hopes he is OK, the report says.
“Detectives read [redacted] his juvenile Miranda Rights in the presence of his grandmother, Judy Billings,” the affidavit reads. Both children were transported to the Little Rock Police 12th Street Station. From there, Billings “took custody” of Waheed’s daughter and police contacted the on-call prosecutor to transport the boy to juvenile intake.
The affidavit says all physical evidence points to Waheed being “in the passenger seat while the vehicle was in motion and after the incident.” The boy told police that “he was driving the vehicle due to his father driving erratically while on narcotics.”
“Ahmad allowed his [11]-year-old son to drive the family through the city of Little Rock,” the document says.
A history of violence
Police reports suggest Waheed is a habitual substance abuser whose bizarre behavior has kept him on law enforcement’s radar. Two police reports from 2021 and 2022 describe separate instances where Waheed was found standing naked in the middle of intersections. Court records show he’s previously been charged with felonies including aggravated assault on a family or household member, 3rd degree domestic battery and a DWI.
In 2018, Waheed assaulted Sharhonda Vurger, repeatedly punching her in the arm while she was receiving dialysis. He said, “I’m helping you die faster and doing you a favor,” according to a police report. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette covered the incident at the time.
Vurger died in 2019. According to her obituary, she was the mother of Waheed’s two children.
Police reports from recent years include multiple accounts of law enforcement seeking help for the children when their dad was in trouble. We know Little Rock police contacted DHS in December 2022, after an incident at the Arkansas Dream Center, a nonprofit Christian child care facility in Little Rock. Witnesses stated they saw Waheed grab his daughter — who would have been 5 or 6 at the time — and lie on top of her, preventing her from breathing. A DHS worker responded to the scene and took custody of Waheed’s kids.
By February 2023, though, the children were apparently back with Waheed. A report from that month says DHS “took custody of the children for the time being” after Waheed failed to pick them up from the Dream Center. Earlier that day, according to a separate police report, Waheed had been found in the driver’s seat of a stalled car on Roosevelt Road. He appeared “incoherent and impaired by something” and was transported to UAMS, the report says.
A month later, he once again had the children: LRPD officers responded to a 911 call from Waheed’s son in March 2023. In the incident report, Waheed’s son, 10 years old at the time, told officers that his father was “attempting to cut off his own penis” in the bathroom. An ambulance took Waheed to a hospital, and officers filed a report with the state child abuse hotline.
A July 2023 police report details an incident where Waheed lost track of his children after using drugs, causing police once again to file a report with the child abuse hotline.
A report from December 2023 describes police responding to a call at Waheed’s address and finding him “speaking incoherently,” prompting them to take his children, who told officers their father was “high off something.” The children were taken to stay with their grandmother, Billings, and police filed another child abuse report.
Billings has also made efforts to separate Waheed and his children. Two days after the March 27 shooting, she filed a petition for an order of protection from Waheed on behalf of her grandchildren to prevent any further contact. Billings stated in the petition that he has “lost the kids often” and “uses PCP all the time.” Billings did not appear in court for a hearing on the petition, though, and it was dismissed.
Billings declined to comment for this story.
As a result of the March 27 shooting, LRPD arrested Waheed on May 9 on two felony counts of endangering the welfare of a minor. On the same day, a Little Rock district judge issued a no-contact order prohibiting Waheed from contacting his children. As of June 12, a trial date had not been set.
DHS policy is to stay closed-lipped about all child welfare cases, so there’s no way to know why the children remained in the custody of their troubled father despite years of reports to police and DHS.
DHS spokesman Gavin Lesnick said he couldn’t speak about a specific case, but shared that in general, the Division of Children and Family Services works closely with law enforcement agencies. DCFS is the section of DHS that handles child welfare cases and the foster care system.
“When the police or DCFS receive a report of child abuse, neglect, or abandonment, they must investigate. If they feel a child is in imminent danger, DCFS can remove the child. Once the child is placed into foster care there are a series of court hearings that guide the next steps related to reunification. DCFS places the child with a safe and appropriate relative or in an approved foster home,” Lesnick said.
From there, DCFS works with the family to make sure the home is safe before children can return, he said.
“Even though reunification of the family is the goal, the court may decide that it is not best for a child to return to his or her family. When this occurs, DCFS will help a child find a permanent family with a relative, fictive kin, or adoptive family, or to live independently if he or she is old enough. Most children who enter foster care return home to their families,” he said.
Austin Gelder, Benjamin Hardy and Mary Hennigan contributed to this story.