A 47-year-old woman with brown eyes, black hair, and a listed height of 5 feet 4 inches is the subject of the latest Fugitive Friday alert out of West Tennessee, wanted on two counts of failure to appear in court. April Lashell Davis is described as weighing 230 pounds, and authorities are asking anyone with information on her whereabouts to come forward.
The notice was issued by the District Attorney General, 29th Judicial District as part of its recurring Fugitive Friday social media campaign, which the office and local sheriff's departments use to crowdsource tips on people with active warrants across Dyer and Lake counties. The attached wanted transcript lists Davis's charges simply as failure to appear on two counts, without detailing the underlying case that first brought her to court. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Dyer County District Attorney's Office at 731-286-8329 or the Dyer County Sheriff's Department at 731-285-2802.
What Failure to Appear Means Under Tennessee Law
Missing a court date in Tennessee is not treated as a minor scheduling issue. Under Tennessee Code Annotated § 39-16-609, failure to appear is classified as its own criminal offense, and state law requires that any sentence for skipping court be served consecutively to whatever sentence comes from the original underlying charge, according to FindLaw. That means a conviction on the two counts listed in Davis's case would stack additional time on top of any penalty tied to the case that originally sent her to court.
State law has also gotten tougher on enforcement in recent years. Under a Tennessee law enacted in July 2024, codified at T.C.A. § 40-11-139, defendants who fail to appear on bench warrants for felonies or for violent or sexual Class A or B misdemeanors must be entered into state and federal fugitive databases, including the National Crime Information Center, within 10 days, per the Baker Law Firm. That same statute gives bail bond sureties 180 days to track down a missing defendant before a court enters final judgment against them, according to Justia Law.
A Two-County District With a History of Public Manhunts
The 29th Judicial District covers Dyer and Lake counties, and it's led by District Attorney General Danny Goodman Jr., who has served as chief prosecutor there since Governor Bill Haslam appointed him in December 2017, a role he was subsequently elected to hold in 2018, according to Ballotpedia. Goodman previously spent 15 years as a General Sessions judge in Lake County before taking the DA post, and in June 2024 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference, the state's top policy-making body for prosecutors.
Court operations in the district split between two historic buildings: the Dyer County Courthouse in Dyersburg, built in 1912, and the Lake County Courthouse in Tiptonville, built in 1936, per American Courthouses. Dyer County, the larger of the two, had a population of 36,801 in the 2020 Census and hosts the main Dyersburg offices for both the sheriff's department and the district attorney. Lake County, by contrast, recorded just 7,005 residents in that same census, making it the fifth-least populous county in the entire state.
A Documented Pattern of Being Hard to Locate
Public court records offer a glimpse of Davis's history of being difficult to find. Legal notices published in September 2024 in the Memphis Daily News show that Shelby County Chancery Court issued an order of publication in a civil divorce proceeding involving Davis after finding her whereabouts could not be ascertained despite a diligent search, a filing that required four consecutive weeks of newspaper publication to move the case forward. It remains unclear whether that civil matter is connected in any way to the criminal failure-to-appear charges now driving the Fugitive Friday alert.
The Dyer County Sheriff's Office has used the Fugitive Friday format before, including a recent post seeking a man wanted on a statutory rape charge and an earlier alert targeting a Dyersburg aggravated assault suspect. As with those prior notices, it's worth remembering that a fugitive listing reflects an accusation and an outstanding warrant, not a determination of guilt. The underlying court dates Davis missed, and whether her case originated in Dyer or Lake County, were not specified in the notice.
