Dednam and his friend, Willie Davis, contacted Alissa "Lisa" Jackson and asked her to call her friend Jerry Otis, the victim in this case.[1] Lisa was instructed to tell Otis that she wanted to meet him at a trailer park in southwest Little Rock. Otis agreed and had his friend, Herman Stevenson, drive him to the rendezvous spot. Upon arriving, Stevenson drove his car down the dead-end street in the park and saw Lisa Jackson. He reached the end of the road, turned around, and pulled his car up to Ms. Jackson. Otis got out of the passenger-side front seat of Stevenson's vehicle and began to enter the car's back seat on the passenger side so that Ms. Jackson could get in the front seat. As he wasgetting in the back seat of the car, he was fatally shot in the right side of the head. Dednam was arrested for the crime and charged with capital murder.
At the ensuing jury trial, the State sought to prove that Dednam's motive in the killing was to silence Otis for the benefit of Dednam's cousin, Antoine Baker, who was in jail at the time due to a crime allegedly perpetrated against Otis. Baker had allegedly tried to rob Otis some months earlier, and Otis was the prosecuting witness against him. To establish motive, the State put on proof that earlier on the day of December 4, 2002, the date of Otis's murder, Dednam had visited Baker in the Pulaski County Jail. In addition, both Stevenson and Ms. Jackson