Jazmine Barnes: 7-Year-Old Girl Shot In Drive-By Shooting In Houston
UPDATE: A suspect has been arrested in the inexplicable shooting death of young Jazmine Barnes.
Larry D. Woodruffe, 24, one of two suspects charged with capital murder in the shooting told his attorney that police have the wrong man: He was not involved in the slaying.
"My experience is that people have a big motive to get themselves out of hot water," his attorney Lisa Andrews told NBC. "It is also my experience, after twenty years of doing criminal law on both sides, that shooters don't give up their gun. And that gun he led the cops to was at his house, not my client's."
The other suspect, Eric Black Jr., 20, is charged in the killing as well. Black admits that he was driving the vehicle from which gunshots were fired, but that’s insists that he isn’t the gunman.
Seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes and three of her siblings were in the car with their mother when evil abruptly entered their lives about 7 a.m. Sunday, December 30, 2018.
A man pulled up next to them and starting shooting, hitting the girl and her mother, according to Harris County Sheriff's Office.
Jazmine, struck by a bullet, died at the scene, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters.
LaPorsha Washington, the girls’ mother, said she screamed, “Get down!” as the gunman took aim at her children. Washington, 30, said she could only shield the child in the front seat as her younger children were left to fend for themselves in the back seat.
"The shots came through my window. It broke my glass. I don't even know how my baby got shot," she told KTRK. Her daughter then called out to her siblings, but one of them didn’t answer: Jazmine.
"She said 'Mama, Jazmine's not moving. She's not talking,' " Washington told the TV station.
"I turn around and my 7-year-old was shot in the head," Washington was quoted as saying.
News cameras showed Washington still in her hospital bed mending from her wound. She was released a day later. "Every time I wake up, I want it to be a dream," Washington told CNN.. "I want to wake up and see my 7-year-old run through the door and give me a hug and a kiss."
Law enforcement said the shooting was an unprovoked attack. The gunman is described as a white man with a beard, possibly in his 40s. He was last seen in a maroon or red truck.
Law enforcement later arrested 20-year-old Eric Black Jr., charging him with capital murder in the slaying. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said that Black "admitted to taking part in the shooting," the office wrote in a statement.
The victim’s mother originally told authorities that a white man had did the shooting, something that Harris County Sheriff’s officials attributed to the confusion of trauma.