One block from home

Janessa Hartley was one day from her 57th birthday when a masked gunman stepped from behind a tree on a quiet Baton Rouge street and shot her through a car door.

The two women spent the evening the way women who have been close friends for 36 years tend to spend evenings: dinner, easy conversation, the ordinary pleasure of being known.

Janessa Hartley, who everyone who loved her called Nessa, had grandchildren waiting on her birthday. One day stood between her and 57.

Linda Donnelly turned onto Brookshire Avenue in Baton Rouge’s Sherwood Forest neighborhood just after 8 p.m. on January 15, 2019.

A large tree stands in the front yard of a corner lot on Brookshire. The streetlight reaches the grass but not the shadows beneath the branches. A shape near the trunk shifts. It separates from the dark and becomes a man.

He moves toward the driver’s side of the Honda CR-V with the deliberate step of someone who has already made up his mind. He wears a hoodie pulled low. A cloth covers everything below the eyes. In his hand is a gun.

“We were looking down a gun barrel,” Linda told Crime Stoppers. “All we could see of the person was his eyes.”

Neither woman m…