Authorities have charged a suspect with capital murder in the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes, as an emotional case that moved the Houston community and evoked racial tensions nationwide took an unexpected turn on Sunday.
Authorities identified the suspect, Eric Black Jr., 20, and said he admitted to taking part in the Dec. 30 shooting.
Contrary to initial reports that the suspect was white, Black is black. It was a revelation that swiftly changed the narrative of a case that had drawn the attention of national civil rights activists amid speculation that the shooting was racially motivated.
Authorities believe that Black, along with an accomplice, thought they were shooting at someone else when they opened fire on Jazmine and her family, who were in a car on an early morning coffee run.
“This is most likely a case of mistaken identity,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County said at a news conference on Sunday.
But to civil rights activists, including Shaun King, who received the tip that led to the arrest, the race of the suspect did not upend the meaning of the case — for Jazmine’s family or for the country.
“We live in a time where somebody could do something like this based purely on hate or race,” he said on Sunday. “And that it turned out to not be the case I don’t think changes the devastating conclusion that people had thought something like that was possible.”
The tip named Black and another man, identified by prosecutors by the initials L.W. A lawyer for Jazmine’s family, Lee Merritt, named the second suspect as Larry Woodruffe, 24, who is also black. A man with that name was booked into the Harris County jail on Sunday on a drug possession charge.
At a hearing to set the bond amount in that case, prosecutors said that Woodruffe was also a suspect in a capital murder investigation.
Gonzalez acknowledged a second person was involved but would not comment on the identity. He said the second person had not been charged in Jazmine’s death as of Sunday afternoon, but said that charges could be filed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.