Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Man charged in Texas girl’s death
Second sought; officers back away from racial bias as motive
A 20-year-old man has been charged with capital murder in the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes in the Houston area last month, and police were pursuing at least one other suspect, authorities said on Sunday.
Authorities identified the man, Eric Black Jr., and said he told them he took part in the shooting, which happened on Dec. 30.
At a court hearing for Black early Sunday, a prosecutor said authorities had gotten a tip about Black and another man, identified by the initials L.W. On Instagram, a lawyer for Jazmine’s family, Lee Merritt, named the second suspect as Larry Woodruffe, 24. A man with that name was booked into the Harris County jail on Sunday on a drug possession charge.
The arrests came after a weeklong search in a case that, on its face, offered few clues: Officials were pursuing reports of a white man in a red pickup who pulled up alongside Jazmine and her family while they were driving to get coffee and then opened fire into their car.
The notion of a white man firing on the family and killing a black girl drew the attention of national civil-rights activists and fueled speculation that the shooting was racially motivated. But the suspect arrested this weekend is black, and authorities said Jazmine’s family’s vehicle may have been targeted by mistake.
“All evidence gathered so far in the Jazmine Barnes Homicide case supports investigators’ strong belief that she and her family were innocent victims,” the Harris County sheriff’s office said in a tweet Sunday.
The office had vowed to find Jazmine’s killer, using the hashtag #JusticeForJazmine, but had said it could not say whether the case was a hate crime. “We’re not ruling anything out and we’re not going to speculate,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said last week.
Merritt, the lawyer who is representing Jazmine’s family, acknowledged on Twitter that the men arrested did not fit the description of multiple witnesses nor the sketch of the suspect released by authorities.
“It is difficult to understand how at least four independent witnesses mistook two black male suspects for one older white suspect,” he said. But he suggested that the man witnesses described could have been a bystander attempting to escape the shooting.
Merritt did not respond to requests for further comment on Sunday.
Jazmine was in the car with her mother and three sisters just before 7 a.m. when a man in a pickup pulled up beside them and began shooting. A bullet struck Jazmine in the head and she died at the scene, police said.
The initial description of the gunman as a white man was based on accounts of the shooting from the family, the sheriff’s office said at a news conference last week. Authorities released a sketch of the suspect, describing him as a thin white man in his 30s or 40s.
Research has shown that stress levels and conditions at the time of a crime can undercut the accuracy of eyewitness identification.
“Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have,” said Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College in North Carolina, who said that people generally try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they know about the world. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we fill in the gaps.”
Jazmine’s mother, LaPorsha Washington, who was injured in the shooting, previously told CNN that she and her daughters were still in their pajamas when they made a coffee run before sunrise. She said that she did not see the shooter, but that her teenage daughter did.
“I don’t know if it was some kind of violent hatred, if it was a hate crime, or what it was,” Washington said. “But you can plainly see through my windows. I have no tint on my windows or anything so you can see that it was a mother, a black mother, with four beautiful children, girls, in this car.”
At a rally for Jazmine on Saturday, supporters clutched banners and artwork dedicated to Jazmine, who was in second grade at a Houston-area school. “No peace, no justice,” the crowd chanted.
It was unclear who was representing Black or Woodruffe. The Harris County public defender’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At the court hearing for Black, a prosecutor said that an anonymous source had contacted authorities and said the men did not realize the vehicle they shot belonged to Jazmine and her family until they saw it on the news.
The prosecutor said Black told authorities that he had driven a rental vehicle during the shooting and that an accomplice had opened fire from the passenger side. Authorities recovered a pistol consistent with evidence at the scene, he said.
In a statement on Sunday, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston thanked the public for an “outpouring of support from across the country.”
“It provided law enforcement with a sense of urgency and made Jazmine’s loved ones know they weren’t alone in their time of grief,” he said, adding: “It’s now my hope that justice will prevail and that Jazmine’s family will find some comfort knowing the alleged gunman is off the street.”