Insets, from left: Zeddrick Ross (Faulkner County Jail) and Jordanne Drinkwater (Jordanne Drinkwater/Facebook). Background: The Walmart in Conway, Arkansas, where Ross allegedly stabbed Drinkwater to death (Google Maps).
An Arkansas Walmart employee "just working her normal shift" was allegedly stabbed to death in the store by a man in what police say was a "random act of violence."
Zeddrick Ross, 37, stands accused of first-degree murder in the death of 32-year-old Jordanne Drinkwater, the Conway Police Department said.
Cops responded around 11 p.m. March 31 to a stabbing in progress at the Walmart on Skyline Drive in Conway, which is some 30 miles north of Little Rock.
Officers arrived at the scene where they allegedly found Ross still armed with a knife. One officer fired a shot at Ross and apparently missed, while another deployed a Taser, which subdued the suspect, cops said. He was taken into custody. Medical personnel pronounced Drinkwater dead at the scene.
According to an arrest affidavit obtained by Law&Crime, Ross believed a demon was following him, so he stole a large knife from a Walgreens nearby and then a machete from the Walmart. He described the demon as a light-skinned Black woman with brown eyes and a weave.
He saw Drinkwater from a distance and thought she was the demon, so he allegedly stabbed her in the shoulder and neck.
"After the stabbing Zeddrick looked down and realized that the female laying on the ground was not the demon, and looked nothing like the demon he thought he was killing," cops wrote. "The individual he was stabbing was actually Jordanne Drinkwater, who is an employee of Walmart who was just working her normal shift."
Cops are still working to see if there was any other motive or connection between the two.
"I hate to sit there and speculate and say anything like 'random act of violence,' but it truly was—there was no correlation between the [victim and suspect] that we found yet, or I was not informed of," police spokesman Daniel Hogan told local ABC affiliate KATV.
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Those who knew Drinkwater spoke highly of her.
"I never met somebody as pure as Jordan," her friend Sam Slaughter told KATV. "I still don't understand why it had to be her. She helped change my entire life for the better — everything from staying sober to the way I think about the world and how it works and not putting more hate into it and just trying to do better. She was an amazing human being. She's going to be so, so missed."
Ross is at the Faulkner County Jail on a $1 million bond. He's next slated to appear in court on April 20.
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