Crossbow case will be worth following
AT an age when most boys are looking forward to entering high school, Shane Brooks, 13, of Wellston, faces the prospect of being tried for first-degree murder in Lincoln County. It’s a case that will bear watching as it moves forward.
District Attorney Richard Smothermon filed the murder charge, which resulted from a shot from a crossbow killing 10-year-old Austin Almanza and wounding Austin’s 8-year-old brother, Ayden. Last week a judge ordered that Brooks undergo a psychological evaluation.
Prosecutors alleges Brooks acted “unlawfully and with malice aforethought” in shooting Austin Almanza on Oct. 21. They will need to prove the latter part of that allegation beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a conviction for first-degree murder, which could be challenging.
According to a court affidavit, the brothers’ uncle told a sheriff’s office investigator that he heard screaming from a nearby treehouse and saw Ayden Almanza had an arrow in his arm. “Shane shot me and my brother,” the boy told his uncle, who also said Brooks told him, “I think I murdered him accidentally” before running home crying.
The uncle also said he had seen Brooks shooting the crossbow the day before, and handling it carelessly, and had warned him not to carry it while loaded.
Ayden Almanza’s mother told investigators she had had “no problem” with Brooks prior to the shooting, but that the boy had once shot her sons with an airsoft gun. She also said Ayden told her Shane had shot them with the crossbow because he “was mad at them.”
Ayden told investigators he doesn’t like Brooks because he “is always mean to him and Austin” but that his brother “always wanted to hang out with him.”
On the day of the shooting, Ayden said, the boys were working on the treehouse together and at one point he wanted to leave. The investigators reported that according to Ayden, Brooks told the brothers “they can’t leave and then became angry when they were attempting to leave.”
Brooks’ stepfather said the boy played with the Almanza brothers “all the time” and that the Almanzas would often spend the night. The investigator noted that the stepfather also said Brooks has “a good temperament but had a hatred of his mother” and had “hit his mother once or twice in the past and the police were called to the residence.”
It’s uncommon to see someone so young be charged with murder as an adult. In Michigan in 1997, prosecutors filed a second-degree murder charge against an 11-year-old who shot a stranger in the head with a rifle; a jury found him guilty. More recently, a 14-year-old boy in Baltimore was one of three people charged with first-degree murder in the 2015 death of a 16-year-old girl. He was acquitted, but found guilty of other charges related to the case.
Peter Weir, a longtime prosecutor in Colorado, wrote in The Denver Post in 2013 that sometimes people younger than 18 “commit crimes that are beyond the pale of civilized society” and thus “forfeit the rights and opportunities available in the juvenile justice system.” Smothermon obviously believes Shane Brooks fits that profile, and stands ready to prove it.