One of three teenagers charged for their roles in a car-to-car shooting in 2020 that killed an 11-year-old girl on Madison’s East Side pleaded guilty Friday to a homicide charge and an attempted homicide charge.
Andre P. Brown, 18, of Madison, pleaded guilty to being a party to first-degree reckless homicide for the Aug. 11, 2020, shooting that caused the death two days later of Anisa Scott, who was riding in a car with her mother’s boyfriend, Christopher Carthans, when they were fired upon by occupants of another vehicle that included Brown.
Brown also pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted first-degree intentional homicide for the shots fired at Carthans.
At the time of the shooting, Brown, then 16, was on a GPS monitor and had juvenile cases pending against him in Dane and Milwaukee counties. A prosecutor said during Brown’s initial court appearance in 2020 that Brown had let the monitor’s battery run down before the shooting, then charged it afterward.
Under the plea agreement, Hess will recommend that Brown spend no more than 40 years in prison, while Kiefer is free to argue for any sentence. There was no agreement about how much extended supervision, following Brown’s prison sentence, the two sides could seek.
The reckless homicide conviction and attempted homicide conviction each carry up to 40 years in prison followed by 20 years of extended supervision.
Brown is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 12 by Circuit Judge Julie Genovese.
A criminal complaint states that Brown, along with Perion R. Carreon, then 19, and Jerry Ward Jr., then 17, was in a stolen Kia Optima that was driving behind a Chevy Tahoe that Carthans was driving. Anisa was Carthans’ passenger.
The complaint states that Carreon told police Brown and Ward fired on the Tahoe two separate times in the space of a few minutes on East Washington Avenue, near Highway 30. But in an amended criminal complaint, filed when Ward was charged about a week after Carreon and Brown, Ward claimed that Carreon fired on the Tahoe both times. Ward has also maintained he was asleep in the back of the Optima when the gunfire started.
At a recent hearing, Genovese denied a motion by Ward’s attorney, Jeremiah Meyer-O’Day, to dismiss the homicide charge against him. Hess said Ward had a gun on his lap and had helped another person in the car clear a gun that had jammed.
In the criminal complaint, Carthans told police he was driving when he heard glass break and realized someone was shooting at him. He saw that Anisa was injured and continued driving while he called 911. He heard four more gunshots and then saw another car with the front-seat passenger firing through the passenger side window, the complaint states.
City street camera video showed the Optima was following the Tahoe on East Washington Avenue and that it turned around to continue to follow the Tahoe.
Carreon also told police he had picked Brown up from an apartment on Northport Drive, the complaint states. He said Brown, seated in the front passenger seat, fired the first shot and that another person in the car fired the second time. He said he was told to turn the car around so that Brown could fire again, the complaint states.
According to federal court documents filed later, Carthans told his federal probation agent that he did not believe he was the target of the shooting, but that it was a case of mistaken identity. He told his agent that he had been mistaken for the older brother of a man who had stolen a “significant amount” of marijuana from a storage locker, and that the pot belonged to a cartel.
Carthans said two of the three charged with the shooting had been hired by the cartel. Police, though, told the agent they doubted the story and said they believed Carthans “knew he was a target and enlisted Anisa to travel with him to discourage anyone from shooting at him,” the court documents state.
For violations of conditions of his federal supervision, U.S. District Judge William Conley sentenced Carthans to 21 months in prison. He was released in February, federal prison records indicate.
Ward is scheduled to stand trial starting on May 31, while Carreon’s trial is scheduled to start June 21. But for the plea agreement, Brown’s trial would have started July 11.
State Journal reporter Dean Mosiman contributed to this report.
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