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 moved.
“At first, your brain doesn’t process it,” Linda said. “We were trying to figure out if it was a joke, somebody playing a prank on us.”
The man tried the driver’s door. It was locked. Nessa revved the engine, trying to frighten him away.
He fired once through the door.
The bullet found Nessa.
Jonathan Ricard, who lived across the street, had already heard raised voices and a man ordering someone out of the car. He heard the shot. Then a woman’s voice: “He shot me.” Ricard phoned 911.
Linda slid the SUV into reverse and backed down the driveway. The gunman raised his weapon again as the Honda rolled into the road.
The driver of a passing van, nearly struck, leaned on his horn. Linda was blowing her own horn by then, screaming for the neighbors to come out.
The man lowered his gun and ran across the lawn and into the dark.
Nessa’s SUV drifted across the street and into Ricard’s driveway. Linda put the car in neutral. It paused, then rolled back into the road.
BRPD Detective Walter Griffin arrived to find a small SUV pulled to the sidewalk and a woman in the driver’s seat who was past saving.
The Baton Rouge Advocate’s account, published the morning of January 16, told it differently: Nessa on the ground outside the car, in the grass on the driver’s side, the window shot out, the vehicle apparently having run off the road.
Detective Griffin’s report placed her in the driver’s seat. Somewhere between Linda’s 911 call and the first officer’s arrival, either the scene changed or the account got it wrong.
In a case that has produced no arrest, small discrepancies like this are the ones that calcify into permanent confusion.
Detective Griffin noted in his report that nothing about the evening had been out of the ordinary. Linda confirmed it: dinner to celebrate Nessa’s upcoming birthday, a routine drive home, no words exchanged at a red light, no road rage, no reason anyone could name.
Linda told WAFB-TV she believed it was a carjacking gone wrong. “The engine was on, the foot was on the brake, the lights were all on,” she said. “When a car passes by, they see the lights. People don’t want to say that can happen here, but it can happen anywhere.”
BRPD Detective Ross Williams agreed that Sherwood Forest functions as a cut-through between Old Hammond Highway and Goodwood.
Side streets like Havenwood Drive carry strangers in and out at all hours with no reason to linger and every reason to go unnoticed.
It is the kind of neighborhood where a car idling at the curb after dark would draw no particular attention.
That is the official accounting: a random target, a random night, a man who saw an opportunity and took it.
The surveillance footage from Kenny Williams’s home complicates that reading. Kenny Williams was Linda’s neighbor and fiancé, and his cameras caught the attacker on film before the CR-V even turned onto the block.
The man hid behind the tree. He waited. He appeared to shout something after failing to open the door. He had a cloth across his face at 8 o’clock on a Tuesday in January.
A man acting on impulse does not hide behind a tree and wait.
The photographs her family circulated after Nessa Hartley’s death show dark brown hair worn to the shoulder, warm eyes, and a constant smile.
She was the fourth child of Lee and Jackie Hargroder, born and raised in Baton Rouge, a graduate of Redemptorist High School in 1980. She married Pete Hartley in 1984 and raised three children with him: Jake, Megan, and Seth.
For years she worked as a classroom assistant at St. Thomas More Preschool before retiring in 2014 to spend her days with her grandchildren, who numbered five by the time she died.
“She was so kindhearted and loving to everyone she interacted with,” Camilla Ponson, the preschool’s receptionist, told reporters on January 16. “I still can’t believe it happened.”
“Nessa and I have been dear and close friends for 36 years,” Linda said. “Her children and grandbabies were her worlds. This senseless crime has devastated all of those close to her.”
Nessa’s family declined to speak with me in 2019.
I understand the silence. There is nothing a reporter can offer that six years of open police files have not already failed to provide.
The grandchildren Nessa retired to be near have grown up in the time this case has been open.
The Baton Rouge Police Department says the case is still open. The man who hid behind a tree on Brookshire Avenue with a gun and a covered face has not been named, charged, or arrested.
Somebody out there knows who he is, knows what he drives and where he sleeps. They always do.