Three more teenagers arrested and charged in the death of a 16-year-old girl last fall will stay behind bars after a Prince George’s County, Maryland, judge deemed all three threats to the community.
Those suspects include 18-year-old Cameron Anderson, 18-year-old Ramon Richardson and a 17-year-old boy, according to prosecutors.
All three are high school students, two of them were on track to graduate this year until their arrest in the shooting death of 16-year-old Jayda Medrano-Moore. She was shot blocks away from DuVal High School last September, taking a bullet for her brother as they walked home from school.
Days after the shooting, a student at nearby Flowers High School was arrested and portrayed by authorities as the gunman that day.
But during a bond hearing, prosecutors say Anderson, also a student at Flowers High School, was the one who provided the gun and ammunition used in Medrano-Moore’s death. And assistant states attorney William Porter said he could face additional charges stemming from his actions in another fight months after the altercation that led to the death of Medrano-Moore.
“There have been other fights between these schools and he has been involved, and not only did he help to supply the gun and the bullets that killed Jayda Medrano-Moore, but we’ve noticed that he was involved — he was at that subsequent fight with these two schools, and he was brandishing a handgun out there,” Porter said.
The other two students were portrayed as playing significant roles in planning the altercation that led to her death.
“If you’re an accessory before the fact or after the fact, you can be charged in the case,” State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy said.
“In this case, we believe that based on the evidence that all of these individuals were involved in the planning and execution of the murder of Jayda. And while we don’t believe that Jayda was the intended target that day, unfortunately, she became the victim.
“We do believe, though, that there was an intent to fight; we believe that there was an intent to carry weapons and use those weapons,” she added. “As a result, anyone who is involved in the planning, we continue to investigate this entire incident, anyone who’s involved in the planning or involved in this death, we will bring to justice.”
Richardson and the 17-year-old are both students at Duval High School, where Medrano-Moore and her brother were students. That’s led prosecutors to rethink the motive they began working with after the first arrest last fall.
“We expect that this is not as simple as rival schools,” Braveboy said. “What we do know is that our young people live in communities. many of them know each other, even if they go to different schools.
“They (the suspects) knew each other outside of simply going to high school together,” she added.
“The fact that there are different high schools, or at least two different high schools communicating or looking like they’re working in concert with each other, that’s something that is new. However, that’s not unusual in an investigation like this. As more information is discovered, then those avenues are pursued by the police department, by our investigators, and then they bring that information to us.”
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