If this suspect were identified as black from the beginning, how might that have changed this story?Ĭrimes with both black victims and black perpetrators tend not to make national news.

So the suspicions that this was a racially motivated attack, even though they were wrong, are based in this very real trendline around interracial violence. The FBI said in a report last fall that hate crimes were up 17 percent in 2017 - the third straight year that hate crimes went up.

More recently, there was the mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in 2015 in South Carolina, and the fatal car attack by a white nationalist in Charlottesville in. That killing helped fuel federal hate crime legislation. was lynched by white supremacists about two hours away from Harris County. Remember, it was only two decades ago that a black man named James Byrd Jr. During that same period, Sheila Jackson Lee, a congresswoman from Houston, called Barnes' killing a hate crime.

In the days after the shooting and before the arrests, Shaun King, an activist who is very prominent on social media, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the suspect's arrest and helped publicize the police sketch of the presumed white suspect. What did race have to do with this story capturing national attention? The police said that they believe that both the white male and the red pickup the girls in the car saw were real, but probably belonged to an innocent bystander who sped away during the confusion of the shooting. Eric Black and the alleged shooter, they say, were trying to retaliate against someone they had gotten into an argument with earlier, and they misidentified the car Jazmine Barnes was in. The police say they think the shooting was a case of mistaken identity. This week, the police have charged two suspects, Larry Woodruffe, the alleged shooter, and Eric Black Jr., the alleged driver. So that, in combination with a police sketch of the suspect, created a real fear that this was a racially motivated attack.īut we now know that the suspected shooter was black And The New York Times reports that there was another still unsolved shooting in 2017 in the same area that witnesses say was committed by a white man in a Ford pickup. The other girls in the car during the shooting said the gunshots came from a red pickup truck driven by a white male. But Jazmine, who was 7, was shot in the head and died at the scene. Her mother was shot in the arm but survived. Gene Demby: Jazmine Barnes was in a car with her mother and three sisters on Dec. National Police In Houston Charge Suspect With Murder In Death Of 7-Year-Old Jazmine Barnes

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