Authorities identified the man, Eric Black Jr., and said he admitted to taking part in the shooting, which happened on Dec. 30.
At a court hearing for Black early Sunday, a prosecutor said authorities had gotten a tip about Black and another man, identified by the initials L.W. On Instagram, a lawyer for Jazmine’s family, Lee Merritt, named the second suspect as Larry Woodruffe, 24. A man with that name was booked into the Harris County jail on Sunday on a drug possession charge.
The arrests came after a weeklong search in a case that, on its face, offered few clues: Officials were pursuing reports of a white man in a red pickup truck who pulled up alongside Jazmine and her family while they were driving to get coffee and then opened fire into their car.
The notion of a white man firing on the family and killing a black girl drew the attention of national civil rights activists and fueled speculation that the shooting was racially motivated. But the suspect arrested this weekend is black, and authorities said Jazmine’s family’s vehicle may have been targeted by mistake.
“All evidence gathered so far in the Jazmine Barnes Homicide case supports investigators’ strong belief that she and her family were innocent victims,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a tweet Sunday.
Merritt acknowledged on Twitter that the men arrested did not fit the description of multiple witnesses or the sketch of the suspect released by authorities.
“It is difficult to understand how at least four independent witnesses mistook two black male suspects for one older white suspect,” he said. But he suggested that the man witnesses described could have been a bystander attempting to escape the shooting.
In a statement on Sunday, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston thanked the public for an “outpouring of support from across the country.”
“It provided law enforcement with a sense of urgency and made Jazmine’s loved ones know they weren’t alone in their time of grief,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.