A 10-year-old Texas boy confessed to the murder of a 32-year-old food worker who was shot inside his home in 2022, the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday.
Brandon O’Quinn Rasberry was found in his mobile home Jan. 18, 2022, after his employer, Holmes Foods, called his landlord because he had not shown up to work in two days, the sheriff’s office said in the release.
Deputies found Rasberry with a single gunshot wound to the head, the sheriff’s office said. Detectives found no leads in a search of the area or forensic analysis of the victim’s cellphone data.
Medical examiners concluded that Rasberry had been dead for about two days before he was found, the sheriff’s office said.
In a statement shared with the Gonzales Inquirer, a local newspaper, a year after Rasberry’s death, the sheriff’s office said that the man’s family was “incredibly heartbroken” and had just gone through “their first holiday season without” him.
Rasberry’s case went unsolved until April 12, when a Nixon-Smiley Consolidated Independent School District principal reported that a 10-year-old boy had threatened to assault and kill another student on a bus, according to the release.
A school official later told a deputy that the 10-year-old said he fatally shot a man two years ago, authorities said.
The boy was taken to a child forensic interviewer and “described in detail” how he killed a man inside a trailer in Nixon, Texas, when he was 7, the sheriff’s office said.
The child said that on Jan.16, 2022, he was visiting his grandfather, who lived in the same RV park as Rasberry. He said he had never met Rasberry and had only seen him walking around earlier that day, authorities said in the release.
The boy took a pistol from the glove compartment of his grandfather’s truck, deputies said in the release, went into Rasberry’s mobile home while the victim was asleep and fired a single shot, striking him in the head. The child allegedly fired another round into the couch before leaving and returning the gun where he found it.
The 10-year-old told the interviewer his grandfather later pawned the gun, which investigators say they were able to recover from the shop in Seguin, Texas, the release stated. Forensic analysis of the firearm determined that it was used in Rasberry’s murder.
After being released from psychiatric evaluation and treatment, the 10-year-old was booked on a charge of making a terroristic threat relating to the school bus incident, the sheriff’s office said.
Since Rasberry’s killing occurred when the child was 7, the sheriff’s office will not file charges. The Texas Penal Code states that “a child does not have criminal culpability until they reach the age of ten years old.”
In a statement shared with local news station KSAT, Nixon-Smiley Independent School District Superintendent Jeff Van Auken said the district has been cooperating with the investigation and that the 10-year-old will not return to the elementary school campus.
Loved ones of Rasberry did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for a comment.