Barnes was in a car with her mother and sisters when a man fired into the vehicle, in what some fear was a racist attack

The FBI has joined local law enforcement in a Texas manhunt to locate the suspect who shot and killed a seven-year-old girl in a drive-by shooting in Houston on Sunday. Prominent local and national activists have put up $100,000 in reward money for the man’s capture as outrage grows over what some suspect may have been a racist attack.

The victim, Jazmine Barnes, was riding in the car with her mother, LaPorsha Washington, and three sisters, leaving a Walmart, when authorities say a man in a red pick up truck pulled up alongside them and fired into the vehicle. The gunfire killed Jazmine and wounded Washington, as well as her six-year-old daughter, who has not been identified.

Authorities said the unidentified gunman is a bearded white male in his forties, and released a grainy video screengrab of his vehicle, but said it did not have any license plates to assist in identifying the owner.

A screengrab released by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office of the vehicle driven by the suspect in Jazmine Barnes’ shooting death. Photograph: Courtesy of the Harris county sheriff's office

“There exists no rationale for the attack other than hate,” said civil rights attorney S Lee Merritt in a tweet. Merritt’s office confirmed he is representing the slain girl’s father, Christopher Cevilla. Merritt has also, along with well-known civil rights activist and writer Shaun King, raised the substantial cash reward for information leading to the man’s capture.

Cevilla, told reporters his daughter was a “loving, caring” young girl, and launched a gofundme for expenses related to her death, which as of Thursday afternoon had raised more than $40,000.

The Harris county sheriff’s office, which is leading the investigation, released a sketch of the man Thursday. “We will not rest until an arrest is made. We are going to continue to search for this killer,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said at a Wednesday news conference.

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From her hospital bed, Washington told reporters that she had “replayed this moment in my head over a million times.

“Did I cut this man off? Did I make a wrong turn in front of him? Did I stop him from getting out of the Walmart, from whatever he was doing, did I do anything wrong to cause this man to fire shots in my car? And I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t make a wrong turn. I didn’t get over in his lane. I didn’t do none of that. He fired off at us for no reason. None,” she told local CBS affiliate KHOU.

Merritt and other local activists noted that the shooting is eerily similar to another shooting that occurred 16 months prior on a nearby stretch of highway. In that incident, 21-year-old A’Vonta Williams and his girlfriend’s grandmother were seriously injured when another driver, also described as a white man in a pickup truck pulled up next to their vehicle and began firing. In both cases, all of the occupants of the cars fired on were black.

Seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes, killed in a shooting near a Houston-area Walmart Photograph: Courtesy of the Harris county sheriff's office

Months after the incident, in a 2017 interview with the Houston Chronicle, Williams said that the authorities who interviewed him after that shooting were more interested in blaming him than finding the attacker.

“The police got there and they were just asking: ‘Who got shot and who I was beefing with? What did I do? Who did I rob?’’ said Williams. “They just kept asking questions, like, making me feel like I had done something bad.”

Sheriff Gonzalez later visited Williams and apologized that he was “treated less than he needed to be treated”, but the case remains unsolved.

Law enforcement has provided no indication that the two shootings are in any way connected. The two shootings occurred six miles and 18 months apart, and the driver in each case was driving a different pickup truck.

Still, Houston-area activist Deric Muhammad can’t help but draw a direct line and wonders if Williams’s shooting were solved, “would Jazmine Barnes still be alive?”

“What are the odds that two black families were fired upon by a white male in a pickup truck within a one-year time span on the same block? We’ve got to call it what it is. Black people are being targeted in this country,” Muhammad told the Houston Chronicle.

Gonzalez said his office was “not ruling anything out”, but that it would be “irresponsible” to claim race was a factor in the attack “without fully knowing that is the linkage”.