Star Staff Reports
A Millington man plead guilty Wednesday, June 8, to attacking a health care provider with a kitchen knife in 2019 at a facility he had set fire to two years earlier, said Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich.
Darryl D. Evans Jr., 40, was sentenced in Criminal Court to 25 years without parole for attempted first-degree murder.
An investigation showed that on the morning of Oct. 7, 2019, Evans waited in a parking lot across the road from Professional Care Services in the 5200 block of Navy Road.
Around 8 a.m., he approached a 40-year-old nurse practitioner and without warning began stabbing her.
The nurse, who did not know Evans, was critically injured with more than two dozen stab wounds in the head, neck, stomach, arms and back.
About six months later, another female employee said a man fitting Evans’ description approached her in the PCS parking lot but left when she did not get out of her car.
Evans said that was him and that he had two knives in his backpack that he would have used if she given the opportunity that morning.
Evans was eventually identified and was arrested about a week later in May of 2020.
He said he was angry that he got no help from the facility. He admitted setting a fire at the facility in 2017 – the last time he was treated there – and was sentenced to two years of probation.
Court-ordered mental evaluations concluded Evans was competent to stand trial and that an insanity defense could not be supported.
The case was handled by Asst. Dist. Attys. Forrest Edwards and Regan Murphy of the District Attorney’s Vertical Team 3 which prosecutes cases in General Sessions Division 11 and in Criminal Court Division 3.
