Chauffeur, bullet-buyer key to shooter’s conviction in Fort Worth murder plotted from jail
The shooter who carried out on a Fort Worth man a hit that was orchestrated by the victim’s son and was motivated in part by the notorious Crips criminal street gang member’s disgust with a multigenerational intrafamily sexual relationship was on Wednesday sentenced to 65 years in prison.
Leaning from the tinted rear window of a sedan driven by a woman he was dating, Damond Cotton felled Kevin Brown Sr. at the mouth of the victim’s driveway with a rifle-fired gunshot wound to Brown’s head.
Cotton committed the Jan. 25, 2022, killing at the behest of Braylin Brown, a widely known rapper in Fort Worth whom he met when both were held at a juvenile prison. Later, from inside the Tarrant County Jail, Braylin Brown arranged the particulars of how and when his father was to die via telephone calls and in text messages he sent on an iPad-like device provided to inmates by the county’s sheriff’s office.
Cotton shot Kevin Brown Sr. in exchange for $2,000 to $3,000 promised by Braylin Brown, according to Ashlynn Durham, who told the jury in Cotton’s trial on a murder indictment that she was driving when Cotton opened fire from the rear seat of a black Chrysler 200. At a trial in November, Braylin Brown was himself found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Beyond his father’s killing, Braylin Brown, who is 23, was indicted on murder in two other homicides in Fort Worth.
Braylin Brown cajoled accomplices using fear, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office argued.
Alexis Abeyta, a girlfriend of Braylin Brown, testified she purchased a box of bullets at Brown’s direction and delivered them to Cotton.
The accounts of Abeyta and Durham were central elements for the state in proving beyond a reasonable doubt the Cotton and Brown cases to their juries. The district attorney’s office corroborated the Abeyta and Durham accomplice testimony with other evidence, including the jail tablet text messages.
The sheriff’s office did not record the jail calls.
Abeyta and Durham have been indicted on murder in the homicide of Kevin Brown Sr. The cases of the killing’s facilitators have not been disposed, and Durham and Abeyta told the juries that although they do not have plea offers from the state, they hope the district attorney’s office will consider their contributions from the witness stand.
Cotton did not testify.
After a six-day trial, a jury in the 396th District Court in Tarrant County assessed the punishment, and Judge George Gallagher sentenced Cotton. The panel was asked to select from a range of between five and 99 years or life. Prosecutors Katie Owens and Matt Rivers requested life. Defense attorneys Randy Bowers and Ray Hall sought a term at the low end of the range but did not ask for a precise number of years.
Cotton, who is 21, will become eligible for parole when he has served half of the sentence.
Kevin Brown Sr. was shot outside of the house in the 2100 block of Beacon Way in which he lived. The neighborhood is near the Fort Worth-Everman border.
The shooting was recorded on a surveillance camera on a house next door. The video includes audio of rapidly fired rifle rounds that the state played for the jury. The shooter’s face is not visible.
Braylin Brown wanted his father dead, prosecutors argued, after he learned Kevin Brown Sr. had in secret been having a sexual relationship with Rebecca Willis, who earlier had such a relationship with Kevin Brown Jr., Braylin Brown’s brother. The siblings were close, and Braylin considered his father “grimey” for engaging in the affair.
The Kevin Brown Sr.-Willis relationship became romantic after the death of Kevin Brown Jr., who was shot during a robbery attempt.
Willis had a child with both men.
Before Cotton could travel to kill Kevin Brown Sr., the Chrysler 200 needed gas.
At Braylin Brown’s request, an associate sent Durham $25.
With the black Chrysler fueled, Durham drove to a spot on a street around the corner from the house where Kevin Brown Sr. lived but within its view, and waited for just under 12 minutes.
In a three-way phone call between Abeyta, Braylin Brown and Kevin Brown Sr., the son, from jail, urged his father to check the mailbox for jewelry.
When he did, Cotton shot him to death.
The driver and passenger did not discuss what had happened until the next day, Durham said.
“He told me that, uh, Braylin had him do it ... so Braylin could get out of jail,” Durham testified.
“So Damond admitted to you that he shot Kevin Brown on behalf of Braylin?” prosecutor Rivers asked.
“Yeah,” Durham answered.
Rivers later sought to clarify that it was indeed Cotton who was responsible for the fusillade.
“I knew it was him because he was sitting back down,” Durham said.
In what way the death would result in Braylin Brown’s release from jail is not clear. Earlier, Braylin Brown was in jail when his mother died of a drug overdose under nebulous circumstances. A judge reduced his bond, and Braylin Brown was released.
Beyond her pending murder indictment, Durham’s life is also imperiled by fear of reprisal. She testified she has received retaliatory violent threats, most recently in the days before she took the witness stand in both phases of Cotton’s trial.
After he was arrested in the homicide, Cotton threatened to kill Durham if she testified against him, according to the district attorney’s office.
Durham testified that she received on March 14 a phone call in which she was told Cotton put a hit out on Durham and attempted to hire a recent cellmate of the defendant to kill Durham to prevent her from testifying against Cotton.
In the punishment phase of the trial, prosecutors Owens and Rivers presented evidence of Cotton’s roles in aggravated robberies and a residence burglary.
Police documented Cotton as a Crips street gang member.
The other offenses were examples of the defendant “putting in work” to earn the respect of other gang members.
The other crimes were the theft of merchandise from a case at a Hulen Mall jewelry store, aggravated robberies of a man outside a game room, a woman outside a plasma donation business, a man organizing cash into stacks inside a vehicle who was fired upon as the victim tried to evade a robbery, and a jail inmate whose commissary items were stolen by force.
Cotton, with others, also burglarized a house and was shot by its owner, prosecutors said.
The jury received a lesson on Crips activity in Fort Worth from Chris McAnulty, a Fort Worth Police Department gang intelligence officer. McAnulty traced the gang’s original Five Deuce Hoova set that was launched in the late 1980s to the 37 Crips sets the department currently documents.
Fort Worth police documented Braylin Brown as a Crips member and monitored him as a person connected to the Rolling 60s, a Crips set.
Homicide Detective Michael Sones recounted to the jury how damage to the vehicle from which the shooter fired in the Beacon Way killing led him to the suspects.
Cotton conducted static surveillance of his victim and waited for Kevin Brown Sr. to emerge.
A neighbor’s surveillance camera recorded the assailants’ vehicle. Its right quarter panel and trunk lid were damaged. Tom Gierling, an officer in the police department’s Real Time Crime Center, reviewed images of license plates attached to vehicles with similar damage that were recorded by a network of city-operated cameras, including one image that was taken about 40 minutes after the homicide. The day after the shooting, Gierling emailed Detective Sones to notify him of a possible match.
Ashlynn Durham and Cotton, her boyfriend, were associated with the vehicle. Her mother was its registered owner.
Durham told Sones she drove Cotton to Beacon Way and was steering when he opened fire.
When police executed a search warrant at an apartment where Durham said Cotton lived, they found handwritten drafts of letters that Cotton wrote to Braylin Brown. The letters suggested a friendly relationship between them. It is not clear whether Cotton mailed a version of the letter.
At the homicide scene, a relative suggested to Detective Sones that Braylin was directly involved.
“You should start there,” Ralph Thornton said.
In her punishment arguments, defense attorney Bowers urged the jury to consider Cotton’s youth. Cotton was 19 when he shot Kevin Brown Sr.
The defense noted a police firearms examiner could not rule in or out the short barrel rifle that police found in a hall closet when they executed a search warrant at an apartment where they arrested Cotton as the firearm from which the projectile that killed Kevin Brown Sr. was fired. Bowers suggested no one lived in the apartment.
There were ejected cartridge casings in the apartment, although testing determined they had been fired from a separate gun.
Police believe the cartridge casings that were ejected when Cotton fired were caught in a container attached to the gun. Police found no casings at the homicide scene.
Daveon Mims-Dubose, who testified he was a participant in some of the robberies in which law enforcement authorities also accuse Cotton, told the jury that Cotton was present for a robbery attempt outside of a bank in which Cotton fired upon the victim’s moving vehicle, but was not a participant in the robbery of a woman in a parking lot outside a plasma donation business.
As the jury walked to the chairs in its box for the final time on Wednesday afternoon, Elwanda Thornton sat in the gallery.
When Judge Gallagher read the punishment verdict term for Cotton in the murder of her son, she pressed together her lips.
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 1:04 PM.
