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Arkansas man arrested for fatally shooting 66-year-old with crossbow: cops

A man fatally shot an arrow at a 66-year-old guy in an Arkansas apartment, and cops found the victim with the crossbow bolt sticking out of him, police say.

Little Rock cops said Jerry Crutcher, 56, fired the arrow at Charlie Williams last Sunday in the victim’s apartment.

Police found Williams dead at 4:40 a.m. with the crossbow bolt sticking out of him.

Jerry Crutcher
Crutcher was arrested over the deadly crossbow shooting. Little Rock Police Dept.

Police added that during the incident, a second victim was identified with an arrow wound.

Crutcher was taken into custody Friday afternoon and charged with first-degree murder and second-degree battery.

He is currently being held at the Pulaski County jail on a $500,000 cash bond.

It wasn’t clear what sparked the bloodshed.

Murder by crossbow has occurred before in The Natural State.

In 2020, Clinton Young, 42, was arrested for shooting his 46-year-old girlfriend in the stomach with a crossbow bolt in Saline County.

And in 2015, 20-year-olds Jonathan Guenther and Brad Hunter Smith were charged with killing Cherrish Allbright, a 21-year-old pregnant woman, with a crossbow and beating her with a baseball bat in Cleveland County.

A study from Western Michigan University found that there were at least 14 crossbow homicide cases in the US between 2015 and 2019.

While a crossbow bolt can be lethal, people can survive being shot at, including Chinese resident Xiao Peng, who was struck near the heart with an arrow in 2020 and was photographed with it still in his chest.