The suspect accused of snatching 4-year-old Cash Gernon from his bed and stabbing him to death says he is not the man seen in video footage in the boy’s room.
A jogger found the boy lying dead in the street on the 7500 block of Saddleridge Drive at 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, May 15.
A coroner determined the boy had been stabbed multiple times.
Darriynn Brown, 18, was arrested later that day and charged with kidnapping and burglary. Injury to a child was added to his list of charges.
Cash and his twin brother were staying at the home of their father’s ex-girlfriend, Monica Sherrod, about eight blocks away from where his body was found.
Sherrod identified Brown in the video surveillance footage. However, Heath Harris, Brown’s defense attorney, says the man seen kidnapping Cash and returning 2 hours later to comfort his twin brother is not Brown.
“The world is basically prejudicing this whole community by saying, ‘That’s him,'” Harris told The Dallas Morning News.
He said, even if the man in the video was Brown, that doesn’t mean his client is a killer.
Since Brown’s arrest, a neighbor of Sherrod’s told police Brown broke into his home, assaulted him and attempted to kidnap his 2-year-old granddaughter in February.
The man said he didn’t press charges at the time because Sherrod (pictured) asked him not to. He said Sherrod told him Brown was staying with her and that he had had a mental episode.
Sherrod originally told police that Brown was a friend of her eldest son. But her son told investigators he knew Brown from high school and they weren’t friends.
Brown is being held in the Dallas County Jail on $1.625 million bail.
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