A twice-convicted felon already under investigation for one freeway shooting was free to gun down a 17-year-old girl in a second — and the system that should have stopped him didn't.
Willie Herndon, 42, of Arlington, Texas, is now charged with first-degree murder in the Oct. 14 death of Alyssa Wilson, a high schooler from Florissant, Missouri, who was driving to a St. Louis Zoo Halloween celebration when she was shot on Interstate 170 in Overland. Federal court documents show investigators had already linked Herndon to another roadway shooting three days earlier — a Oct. 11 incident on Interstate 55 where a vehicle was struck by gunfire and a spent shell casing was recovered with the same manufacturer's headstamp as the casing found at Alyssa's murder scene. Security video showed a white SUV parked on the shoulder that fled immediately after that shooting. Nobody was hurt that time. So nobody stopped him.
Herndon's rap sheet should have been enough to keep him off the street. According to the federal complaint, he was convicted in Los Angeles of taking a vehicle without consent in 2001 and of receiving known stolen property and burglary in 2015. He's now facing a federal charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm — a charge that only exists because the system already knew he was dangerous and did nothing to prevent him from getting a gun and using it on American highways.
After the murder, Herndon's wife, Taiya Herndon, allegedly drove the pair to an Illinois hotel roughly 12 miles from St. Louis, according to authorities. She faces a state charge of hindering prosecution. Authorities say Alyssa had no ties to either of them — she was simply driving to a Halloween event, a teenager minding her own business.
A search of the Herndons' hotel room turned up notebooks with handwritten license plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, and accounts of law enforcement personnel Willie Herndon believed were following him, the federal complaint states. The pair had driven from Texas to Arkansas to Missouri starting Oct. 2, using multiple Oklahoma license plates that didn't belong to their white SUV. One plate was switched after Alyssa's shooting, prosecutors allege. This wasn't a crime of passion — it was premeditated, paranoid, and methodical.
NBC News reported that Herndon is scheduled for a pretrial detention hearing in U.S. District Court in East St. Louis on Tuesday, with a preliminary hearing set for Nov. 4. His federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, another teenager is dead because the system failed to intervene before it was too late. The Detroit Free Press reported that Jackson Matthew Lakies, 18, has been charged with second-degree murder after driving a 2016 BMW at approximately 129 mph on a road near Traverse City before losing control and striking a tree, killing his 17-year-old passenger, Jason Douglas Soloman. Data recovered from the BMW showed no braking until half a second before impact. Lakies also faces an operating while intoxicated causing death charge. He wasn't stopped before the crash either.
Two teenagers dead. Two known dangers left free until the damage was irreversible. Alyssa Wilson's father, Robert Hickman, said it plainly at a news conference Monday: "Alyssa was 17, excited about her life, excited about her future. This was a senseless act."
The question isn't whether these acts were senseless. The question is how many more known threats are roaming free right now, waiting to become the next headline.
