Was fatal shooting of a Houston girl racially motivated?

HOUSTON — The sister of a 7-year-old Houston girl shot to death in her family car said she locked eyes with the killer before he started firing into the vehicle holding a mother and four daughters.

Investigators are trying to determine a motive for the attack that killed Jazmine Barnes. The girl’s mother, who was shot in the arm, said she believed the attack on her black family was motivated by race.

“This is something I believe was a hate crime,” LaPorsha Washington said Thursday.

Jazmine was killed Sunday as she sat behind the driver’s seat on a grocery shopping trip. The unidentified white attacker remains at large.

“We’re not ruling anything out,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said at a Wednesday news conference. “We’re not tone-deaf to some of the concerns in our community, where these could be potentially race-related. We’re not going to ignore that issue.”

Jazmine’s slaying has gained national attention at a time when white nationalists have become more outspoken and videos documenting attacks on blacks have gone viral, including a recent incident in which a man leans over a McDonald’s counter and grabs a female employee.

Investigators have little to go on beyond the family’s account and grainy surveillance video showing the gunman’s red pickup just before the attack. On Thursday, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office released the video and a composite sketch of the gunman based on the family’s accounts.

The man, described as in his 40s and wearing a hooded sweatshirt, fired from the truck into the car Jazmine was riding in with her mother and three sisters, striking the second-grader in the head, according to officials. Two of the other girls were injured by broken glass and had to be hospitalized.

The family said the man had stopped next to their car at a red light before the attack.

On Thursday, at a news conference held by the family, Jazmine’s 15-year-old sister Alxis Dilbert said she looked directly into the killer’s eyes just before the shooting.

“You know how when you’re driving and y’all make eye contact and look back? It was like that,” Alxis said. “He was white and he had blue eyes and that was it, because he had a hoodie on. I couldn’t see his hair.”

Washington has said her 6year-old was the first to notice Jazmine was unresponsive. “She said, ‘Momma, Jazmine’s not moving. She’s not talking.’ I turned around and my 7-year-old was shot in the head.”

Washington said she worried about her daughters, especially the 13-year-old, who was sitting next to Jazmine during the attack. “She hasn’t dropped a tear. And it scares me — because I don’t know what’s going on in her head. She saw it all, and she’s got to remember that.”

Gonzalez said officers were pursuing tips in the case and reviewing a similar unsolved shooting from 2017.

On Aug. 30, 2017, a white man in a pickup opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle at a group of black people in a car about six miles from where Jazmine was shot, injuring two people, according to the sheriff ’s office. No one was killed, and the shooting, which occurred soon after Hurricane Harvey struck the city, remains unsolved.