The Garland Police Department (GPD) has two Dallas teens in custody in connection with a murder committed in February.
As The Dallas Express previously reported, on February 5 at around 12:30 a.m., a vehicle struck an apartment building near the 4600 block of Saturn Road and started a fire.
Upon arriving on the scene, GPD found two gunshot victims inside the crashed vehicle: 22-year-old Quincy Lee Branch and an unidentified 19-year-old male. While the younger victim survived, Branch died from his injuries.
The investigation led GPD to two suspects, one aged 14 and the other 15, according to reporting by WFAA.
When speaking with The Dallas Express, GPD said that one of the teen suspects had already been taken into custody by the Dallas Police Department (DPD).
“The [14-year-old] was already in custody on an unrelated charge when the murder charge was added,” said Garland police officer Felicia Jones, speaking to The Dallas Express.
The 15-year-old teen is now also in custody and has been charged with murder, police said.
Both suspects are currently being held in the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center, per WFAA.
Violent crime continues to be a problem in the greater Dallas area, with the city’s criminal activity often spilling into neighboring communities.
There have been 1,787 violent crimes logged in Dallas this year so far, according to the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard, 42 of which are criminal homicides.
Earlier this year, another juvenile from Dallas was charged with murder for firing a gun during an argument and fatally wounding an 11-year-old bystander. The incident, which took place in the parking lot of an East Oak Cliff apartment complex, led to a 14-year-old girl being charged with murder and left a community devastated, as The Dallas Express reported.
According to The Dallas Morning News, roughly 7,000 youths enter the juvenile justice system annually in Dallas County.