Two men arrested and charged in the shooting murder of 7-year-old Texas girl
Early this morning, just after midnight, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office released word that their homicide investigators arrested two men and charged them both in the shooting murder of seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes, the child that was shot to death as she rode in her mother’s car on the morning of December 30. Capital murder charges have been filed against 20-year-old Eric Black Jr. according to the Sheriff’s office.
Larry Woodruffe, 24, has been identified by police as Barnes’ shooter and is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail on a separate drug charge not connected to the Jazmine’s December murder, according to UPI.
Homicide detectives learned about Black from a tip that came in to the office. Following his arrest in Harris County, Black confessed to his part in the shooting of Jazmine and her family.
On January 3, law enforcement officials in Harris County released an artist’s rendering of the man believed to be responsible for the horrific and cowardly shooting death of seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes who died when the shooter – described as a thin, white male with blue eyes, 30-40 years-old – pulled up alongside the car she was riding in last Sunday morning near Houston around 6:50 a.m. and sprayed her car with bullets. Jazmine was in the car with her mom and two sisters riding to a local store when the man driving what’s described as a red pickup truck fired shots into Jazmine’s mother’s car, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
Jazmine, still wearing her pajamas while making that coffee run with her mother and two sisters, suffered a gunshot wound to the head and died in her mother’s car. After Jazmine’s sister provided a description of a thin white man with blue eyes as the suspected shooter, Jazmine’s mother, LaPorsha Washington, 30, told officials that she felt that the shooting was racially motivated.
But Black, the actual shooter, is an African American. Police say they believe that the shooting now appears to be a tragic case of mistaken identity and that Jazmine’s family weren’t the intended targets of the shootings. Police also say now that the white male suspect depicted in the artist’s rendering was more than likely a witness that was in the area of the shooting.
One source told investigators that Black thought that Washington’s car was actually “some other person’s vehicle that they had seen earlier in the night and that they shot the car by mistake,” according to the complaint obtained by KPRC-TV.
“The source said that they did not realize the vehicle that they had shot into was the complainant’s vehicle until seeing it on the news later in the day,” according to a report from The Guardian.
As for the artist’s rendering of a white male suspect, the attorney for Jazmine’s mother’s family wrote “It is difficult to understand how at least 4 independent witnesses mistook 2 black male suspects for 1 older white suspect. However it is imaginable that witnesses confused a fleeing bystander for the actual shooter.”
See: Cops release sketch of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes’ murderer
Jazmine will be laid to rest on Tuesday at a funeral service held at Green House International Church. The service will honor Jazmine and all murder victims in Houston and Harris County.
For more on the story, see the video accompanying this article
~ Written by: Richard Webster, Ace News Today / Connect with Richard on Facebook and Twitter
