Murder suspect Arthur Morris Jr.
Arlington Police on Friday, Oct. 17, announced that they have issued a warrant for 25-year-old Arthur Morris Jr., charging him murder in connection with the Sept. 30, 2021, shooting death of transgender woman Kier Laprice Solomon.
Police said Morris is already in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, serving a seven-year prison sentence for an unrelated aggravated robbery conviction.
Solomon, who was 21 at the time of her death, was also known as Kiér Laprí Kartier. She was found in her car, parked at an apartment complex in the 1100 block of Stonetrail Road in North Arlington. According to police reports at the time, Solomon “was transported to a local hospital where she was later pronounced deceased.”
According to reports this week by Fox4, during the initial investigation, detectives recovered Solomon’s phone from the car and from it learned she had been messaging with an unidentified person through an app and had arranged to meet that person at the location where Solomon was found.
Police then learned that the number used to communicate with Solomon was a temporary number that had been generated by the app before eventually discovering that, in a separate incident two weeks before, someone had messaged a different person on the same app and had arranged a meeting at the same location.
In that first incident, a suspect stole items from the victim then pulled a gun and fired at the victim’s car.
Other evidence uncovered in the investigation linked Morris to that incident, making him a “person of interest” Solomon’s murder.
In September this year, four years after Solomon’s murder, several search warrants related to the app account uncovered an email address and a cell phone number that detectives connected to Morris. Records for that cell phone number placed Morris at the crime scene before, during and after the murder.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office and detectives then moved forward with the murder charge against Morris. They also charged him with aggravated robbery for the earlier incident.
Morris is currently being held at a TDCJ facility in Childress, according to Fox4, but he will be returned to Tarrant County for his arraignment.
— Tammye Nash
Related