The family of Sydney Sutherland is getting justice for her tragic death.
The 25-year-old nurse disappeared on August 19, 2020, while jogging in the Newport area, near Little Rock, Arkansas. Her concerned family and friends immediately mobilized, organizing searches in the area.
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What her family and others who volunteered to search for Sutherland could have never known was that her killer was among them. Quake Lewellyn joined the search, as well as a Facebook group dedicated to bringing Sutherland home. Sadly, the search concluded after two days when Sutherland's body was found in a shallow grave not far from Lewellyn's home. He was arrested days later.
In October 2020, Lewellyn pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping, capital murder, abuse of a corpse, and rape. A mental health evaluation was done the following month and determined that Lewellyn was stable enough to understand his plea and face trial.
On October 1, Lewellyn reversed his plea and confessed in open court to raping and murdering Sutherland. According to court documents obtained by The Jonesboro Sun, he confessed to a mental health professional that he was driving around checking wells when he mowed Sutherland down with his car. There are differing reports on whether or not he intentionally struck her with the vehicle.
Changing his plea allowed Lewellyn to evade the death penalty, which prosecutors were prepared to pursue.
Lewellyn then said he loaded Sutherland's body into his truck's tailgate and drove to a rice field, where he planned to bury her. Before doing so, he raped her. In his haste, he buried her in a shallow grave.
Sydney Sutherland's mother, Maggie Sutherland, ordered Lewellyn to look her in the eye as she read her victim impact statement. "Was it really worth it? What you took from us 408 days ago we’ll never get again," she said.
"You treated her like nothing but she was everything to me. You didn't just kill Sydney that day, something in me died, too."
"She was not yours to take," Maggie Sutherland continued. She then noted her own personal interaction with Lewellyn during the search for her daughter.
"Satan is real. The hands you hugged me with are the same hands you killed her with."
"I take pleasure in knowing that from this day forward you'll be known as a number with no name," she concluded.
Sydney Sutherland's father, Dion Sutherland, called Lewellyn "a 300-pound coward that hit my 100-pound daughter with a 3,000-pound truck."
John Pettie with the Jackson County Sheriff's Office commended the family's strength following the sentencing.
"We're proud to bring some semblance of justice for the family. If you all were in there and saw that victim impact statement that Maggie Sutherland gave I think we all witnessed true strength in person today," he said.
"It is the hope of this office that the Sutherland family can now have some closure and sense of finality. No length of incarceration or no punishment under the law will ever be sufficient to provide retribution of the evil mind that perpetrated to these heinous acts."
