The case of a 15-year-old boy who is accused of capital murder in the shooting death of another student on steps outside Lamar High School in Arlington will be heard in two months by a jury in juvenile court after a judge on Friday denied a petition prosecutors filed seeking its transfer to adult court.
A spray of shotgun pellets missed all but two of about 20 students who were waiting for the school doors to be unlocked early on March 20, the Monday after spring break.
After his arrest, the accused shooter told law enforcement that he fired when he saw a person who appeared to look like a boy who raped him in October in a bathroom at the school.
In his closing argument at Friday’s certification hearing, Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Lloyd Whelchel told Judge Alex Kim the sexual assault account was false and concocted by the suspect to attempt to explain what the prosecutor said is the most heinous of offenses.
Police seized a 12-gauge shotgun at the shooting scene. The shotgun had a fired cartridge in the chamber that appeared to be the same as a fired 12-gauge cartridge recovered from the scene, wrote Bryan Cline, an Arlington police detective assigned to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives task force, in a criminal complaint supporting a firearms charge filed in U.S. District Court against the accused shooter’s father.
The teenager accused in the homicide was arrested in the minutes after the shooting. Kim has ordered that he be held at a juvenile detention facility.
Jashawn Poirier, 16, died at a hospital after he was shot outside the school. Another student, a 16-year-old girl, suffered a graze injury to her face.