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, and a judge noted that Woodruffe could possibly face additional charges.
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. Lawyers for the men could not be immediately reached for comment on Sunday.
The capital murder charge filed against Black came after a weeklong search in a case that seemed to offer few clues. Jazmine was with her mother and three sisters just before 7 a.m. local time when, authorities said, a man in a truck pulled up beside them and began shooting. A bullet struck Jazmine in the head, and she died at the scene, authorities said.
Authorities released grainy images of a red pickup truck and a sketch of the suspect, describing him as a thin white man in his 30s or 40s.
Gonzalez said there was indeed a red pickup truck that came to a stop at a traffic signal next to Jazmine and her family, near a Walmart in the Houston area where the shooting happened. But authorities now believe that driver could be a witness to the shooting.
Jazmine was with her mother, LaPorsha Washington, and her sisters, including a 6-year-old and two teenagers, authorities said. Washington, who was injured in the shooting, told CNN she did not see the gunman but her teenage daughter described him as a white man with blue eyes.
“This just went down very quickly,” Gonzalez said. “When the gunfire erupted, we are talking about small children, they witnessed something very traumatic. And it’s very likely the last thing they did see was that red truck and the driver in that truck.”
Research has shown that stress levels and conditions at the time of a crime can undercut the accuracy of eyewitness identification. The sheriff and the family said the sun had not yet risen when the shooting happened.
“Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have,” said Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College in North Carolina, who said that people generally try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they know about the world. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we fill in the gaps.”
After Jazmine’s killing, the public mobilized to help the family. On Saturday, the day before the arrest was announced, nearly 1,000 people gathered at a rally in Houston, clutching banners and shouting for justice for Jazmine, who was in second grade at a Houston-area school.
DeAndre Hopkins, a wide receiver for the Houston Texans, had pledged to donate his paycheck from this weekend’s playoff game, which amounts to $29,000, to help pay for Jazmine’s funeral. And King, a prominent racial justice activist and a columnist at The Intercept, had raised a $100,000 reward for information leading to the gunman’s arrest.
King, who has five children, including a 6-year-old daughter, said he did not get involved in the case because he thought the gunman was white.
“I internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed,” he said.
He said he would move forward with distributing the reward money to the anonymous tipster should the person claim it. “Whether it fits the direction people thought the case was going or not,” he said, “it took tremendous courage for somebody to report this.”
Merritt, the civil rights attorney who is representing the family, said he was glad that the racial implications of the case were taken seriously — and that Jazmine’s death got widespread attention.
But it “shouldn’t only be weaponized for political purposes when the suspected killer is white,” he said. “The whole movement of Black Lives Matter is about the attention and care that is given to people of color in the face of violence.”
Merritt said that while the arrest came as a surprise to Jazmine’s family, it also came as a relief, as they mourned and prepared for her burial on Tuesday.
“They didn’t want a white person to be prosecuted,” he said. “They wanted the right person to be prosecuted.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.