Gunman found guilty of capital murder in Fort Worth killings of 5-year-old and teenager
A jury on Tuesday found guilty of capital murder one of two people who from a street fired guns into a far northwest Fort Worth house in which a 17-year-old and 5-year-old were shot to death in the garage.
At 16 years old at the time of the shooting in August 2022, Jay Nixon-Clark was a juvenile and will serve 40 years in prison before he is eligible for parole. If he is not paroled, Nixon-Clark will serve life. Defendants who are adults at the time of a capital murder of which they are convicted are ineligible for parole of the automatic sentence of life in prison.
The 18-month-old son of the teenage victim was also shot. The child survived, and the jury in an auxiliary district court in Tarrant County also convicted Nixon-Clark of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and assessed his punishment at five years in prison.
The bullets that killed 17-year-old Jamarrien Monroe and his 5-year-old cousin Rayshard Scott were not recovered during autopsies. It is not clear whether the rounds were fired from the gun whose trigger was pulled by Nixon-Clark or the gun prosecutors allege codefendant Anthony Bell-Johnson fired, though evidence suggests that Nixon-Clark fired one round before his gun jammed.
The jury, which deliberated for about seven hours after a three-day guilt-innocence trial phase, was instructed on the law of parties that holds a person criminally responsible for the conduct of another person if the defendant solicits, encourages, directs or aids the other person to commit an offense.
After Nixon-Clark was sentenced, Jamarrien’s Monore mother, Tijuana West, addressed him.
Speaking in the courtroom, West said that the defendant’s family and hers share in the pain of the Aug. 28, 2022, shooting.
“We can never get back what we lost,” she said.
Bell-Johnson is awaiting trial in the case.
On the day of the shooting, Bell-Johnson and Nixon-Clark got out of a Chevrolet Equinox on a street in a new subdivision. They were there at midday to shoot Jamarrien Monroe because Bell-Johnson and Nixon-Clark believed that associates of Monroe had fired bullets upon a house in which Bell-Johnson’s relatives lived, according to a Fort Worth Police Department homicide detective.
Nixon-Clark would later tell the detective, Jerry Cedillo, that he left the SUV with a white Kriss Vector, a unique semiautomatic gun.
Also in the street outside the house where Monroe lived was Bell-Johnson, who is known as One Leg. Bell-Johnson uses a prosthetic limb after losing his leg as a child in a train accident. He once held the artificial limb and pretended to fire it in a fashion similar to the way in which police allege he handled the Draco, an AK-style pistol known as a chopper, from which he fired 7.62 rounds into Monroe’s house on Steel Dust Drive. The ejected cartridge casings of 15 such rounds were left in the street when Bell-Johnson was done.
Monroe was in the garage. Its door was up, and the 17-year-old and four children who were also there were exposed to the shooters.
Nixon-Clark fired one round that was collected from a stairwell inside the house before the gun jammed, according to prosecutors. (In the final of several accounts he offered to detectives in an interview, Nixon-Clark admitted that, before it jammed, he fired a round when the gun was pointed toward the ground.)
After he was shot in the abdomen, Monroe ran from the garage to the laundry room and kitchen before he collapsed near the front door. The round transected an artery and Monroe left a trail of his blood on the floor as he moved through the house.
Monroe, who was pronounced dead at a hospital, was the target, but two children were also felled by gunfire.
Jamarrien Monroe’s 18-month-old son, Jhacari Monroe, was grazed in the leg.
Jamarrien Monroe’s cousin, Rayshard Scott, who was 5, was shot in the torso. He fell to the garage floor near the door leading to the interior of the house. He, too, would be pronounced dead at a hospital.
Nixon-Clark was indicted under a statute that alleges he intentionally or knowingly caused the death of multiple people at the same time. Nixon-Clark was certified to be tried as an adult after the case was first filed in a juvenile court.
This story was originally published January 14, 2025 at 4:03 PM.
