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HOUSTON (FOX 26) - We are now getting a look at the man who shot 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office has released a sketch.
"I’m praying that the phone rings right now as you’re in here filming us. That’s how much I want him caught, like any second,” says Jazmine’s mom LaPorsha Washington.
Her 7-year-old daughter was shot to death in the backseat of her car as she drove near the East Sam Houston Parkway and Wallisville Road Sunday morning. The family hopes her killer will be caught sooner rather than later.
"He’s going to slip up somewhere and I’m going to be there. He’s going down for sure,” says Jazmine’s dad Chris Cevilla. Perhaps a growing reward, which has now topped $100,000, will help.
"This is something I believe was a hate crime,” Washington adds.
She says the man who opened fire into her car, also shooting her in the arm, was a white man wearing a black hoodie, driving a red pick up truck who had pale skin and blue eyes.
Some community leaders believe the shooting that left Jazmine dead is connected to an incident in 2017 where a white man with an AR-15 was reportedly shooting at random cars near that same area. At least two black people were shot in that 2017 incident ,including a 21-year-old man and a grandmother.
“It’s not a coincidence, it’s not and we didn’t do anything wrong to this man. So it was something in his mind that he had planned on doing beforehand,” explains Washington. She’s concerned about her three daughters as they grieve the death of their sister, particularly the 13-year-old who she says hasn’t shed a tear and is keeping her grief bottled inside. It was her 15-year-old who worked with a sheriff’s office sketch artist to give the rest of us a look at the face they saw as he opened fire on four little girls and their mother.
They hope that sketch will lead to the killer’s arrest.