A 10-year-old Texas boy, who confessed to fatally shooting a sleeping man when he was only 7 years old, will not face any criminal charges for the murder, according to authorities.
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On Thursday (April 18), the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO) announced that the child — whose name was not released as he is a minor — confessed to killing a man at an RV park with his grandfather’s gun while visiting his grandparent in early 2022.
According to the GCSO officials, the boy’s confession was consistent with the killing of 32-year-old Brandon O’Quinn Rasberry, who was fatally shot in the head at Lazy J RV Park in Nixon, Texas in January 2022. It’s reported that Rasberry had moved into his home just four days before his murder. At the time, the medical examiner determined Rasberry’s manner of death was homicide, but investigators had arrived at a dead end after interviewing “all possible witnesses.” The GSCO said, “All leads were exhausted.”
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However, two years after his death, Rasberry’s homicide case was brought back to the forefront on April 12, 2024, when the Nixon Smiley Independent School District informed the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office that a student threatened to kill another student on the bus a day before. School officials later told a Sheriff’s Deputy that a 10-year-old boy claimed he fatally shot a man two years earlier.
The GSCO said, “Investigators determined, based on the information the child told the school, the child may have knowledge about the murder of Brandon. The child was transported to a child advocacy center where a forensic interview was conducted. During the interview, the ten-year-old child described in detail that two years ago he shot and killed a man in a trailer in Nixon, Texas.”
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When investigators spoke with the child, he reportedly provided information that was “consistent with first-hand knowledge” of Rasberry’s murder. According to the GCSO, the 10-year-old Texas boy admitted that while visiting his grandfather at the RV park on January 16, 2022, he grabbed a pistol out of the glove box of his grandparent’s car. He then claimed to have entered the victim’s RV while he was sleeping and shot him once in the head.
The GCSO reported that the boy, who was 7 at the time, said he then shot the RV’s couch and exited the home before putting his grandfather’s pistol back into his car’s glove box. The Sheriff’s Office said, “When asked, the child stated he had never met Brandon and did not know who he was although he had observed him walking around the RV earlier in the day. The child was also asked if he was mad at Brandon for some reason or if Brandon had ever done anything to him to make him mad, the child stated no.”
The GCSO also revealed that before learning of the boy’s confession and how the gun was “used to commit the murder,” the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms San Antonio Field Office observed two spent shell casings from the crime scene and later recovered the weapon from a pawn shop in Seguin, Texas on April 12.
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Upon confessing to fatally shooting the sleeping man, the 10-year-old Texas boy was placed on a 72-hour emergency detention evaluation at a psychiatric hospital in San Antonio, Texas. After, he was transported to the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office, where he was booked on charges “relating to the school bus incident for Terroristic Threat (Texas Penal Code 22.07).” He was subsequently placed in detention by Gonzales County Juvenile Probation as he awaits a court date.
The GSCO added, “Texas Penal Code 8.07 states that a child does not have criminal culpability until they reach the age of ten years old.” Being that the child was turning 8 years old at the time of the January 2022 killing “charges for murder will not be filed and cannot be accepted by the Gonzales County Attorney’s Office for consideration of prosecution in accordance with state law.”
Reacting to the news, the father of the victim, Kenneth Rasberry, told local ABC affiliate KSAT how he was “very shocked” to learn that the child “isn’t anywhere the suspect that we thought it was.” He added, “This is a little boy, for reasons that I’m sure these counselors and case managers and all of that, that’s going to pick that poor little boy’s brain apart. He needs to be prayed on. He needs to be comforted … He’s forgiven. And he can still be saved. He’s so young. He’s definitely tormented by something.”
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