GONZALES COUNTY, Texas – A boy, who is now 10 years old, confessed to an unsolved murder from 2022, Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office announced on Friday.
But GCSO said he will not be charged with the crime because he committed it before the age of culpability.
Brandon O’Quinn Rasberry, 32, was shot and killed while he slept in his RV at the Lazy J RV Park located at 85 Wild Meadow in Nixon. He had just moved there four days before.
His body was discovered after he failed to show up to work for two days. He had been shot one time in the head.
In a press release, GCSO said on April 12, they received a call from a Nixon-Smiley Independent School District principal about a student who threatened to assault and kill another student on a bus. During the district’s threat assessment, they learned that the child made a statement about shooting and killing a man two years ago.
Investigators questioned the child at a child advocacy center. He described in detail shooting and killing a man in a trailer in Nixon that was consistent with Rasberry’s slaying.
He told investigators that he was visiting his grandfather at his house, which was a few lots apart from Rasberry’s. The boy said he got a 9 mm pistol from the glove box of his grandfather’s truck and entered Rasberry’s home.
He told investigators he saw the man sleeping in his bed and he shot him. He said he discharged the firearm a second time into a couch in the RV and then returned the firearm to the glovebox of his grandfather’s truck, GCSO said.
The child said he had never met Brandon and wasn’t mad at him.
The child told investigators his grandfather had pawned the gun. On April 12, investigators located the firearm at a pawn shop in Seguin.
The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms San Antonio Field Office used ballistic testing to determine that the gun was the same one used to kill Rasberry.
The child was placed on 72-hour emergency detention “because of the severity of the crime and because of the continued concern for the child’s mental wellbeing the child,” the sheriff’s office stated.
He was transported to a psychiatric hospital in San Antonio for evaluation and treatment and then was taken to GCSO, where he was booked on terrorist threat charges relating to the school bus incident.
Texas Penal Code 8.07 states that a child does not have criminal culpability until they reach the age of 10 years old, so he will not be charged with murder in Rasberry’s death.
In a letter to parents, Nixon-Smiley Superintendent Jeff Van Auken said that the child will not be returning to the elementary school he was attending.
You can read the letter below:
Nixon Smiley ISD Statement by David Ibanez on Scribd