Family of four-year-old Brayden Barksdale, the child killed at his Sobley Road home in January 2015, had one question for the man who shot him: why?
It was the question Barksdale’s aunt, Crystal Powell, asked Patrick Chambers at his hearing in Lowndes County Circuit Court Friday morning when he entered a guilty plea to capital murder in the commission of child abuse.
“Every day I wake up and I wonder what Brayden would be like today,” Powell said when reading her victim’s impact statement to the court. “… He was just a baby. If you have any good in your heart and any conscience at all, tell us why you pulled that trigger.”
Circuit Court Judge Jim Kitchens sentenced Chambers to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a fact which Powell said gave her “a small amount of pleasure.”
“I hope you cannot sleep at night because of what you’ve done,” she said.
Chambers shot Barksdale with a .45-70-caliber hunting rifle in the home where he lived with Barksdale’s mother on Sobley Road. He was charged with murder and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.
Chambers initially told investigators Barksdale had shot himself, Assistant District Attorney Armstrong Walters told the court. After investigators confirmed a child Barksdale’s size couldn’t have shot himself, Chambers admitted to pointing the gun at Barksdale but that it went off accidentally. However investigators also determined it was impossible for the rifle to have gone off by itself.
Because he is a habitual offender, Chambers will spend the rest of his life in prison. He has several felonies from Williams County, North Dakota, including conspiracy to commit burglary and multiple counts of violation of a protection order.
Had Chambers gone to trial, he would have faced a jury in Union County and would have been eligible for the death penalty, Kitchens said.
Walters said Barksdale’s family agreed to the plea deal as long as they were guaranteed Chambers would never be released from prison.
At Chambers’ hearing, Barksdale’s family and friends crowded the courtroom benches. Many of them sobbed openly. Barksdale’s father, Jeffrey Barksdale, who was wearing a black t-shirt that said, “Justice for Brayden,” dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.
Even Kitchens appeared to get choked up as he read the victim’s impact statement from Amy Boykin, Barksdale’s mother.
“He will never get the chance to go to school, have friends, write his name or live his life,” Kitchens read. “… Brayden was the one thing that kept me grounded.”
In her statement, Boykin described Barksdale as “a Southern little boy with the biggest heart anyone has ever seen.” And like Powell, she asked why Chambers committed the murder.
“How can anyone look at someone so small … who trusted him?” her statement said.
Boykin’s statement went on to say she was exhausted in heart, mind and soul and that she blamed herself but would never have left her son with anyone she thought would hurt him. She said she sometimes went to his grave and cried.
“It’s hard to find happiness when you feel like it’s been taken away by a careless action,” the statement said.
Chambers said in court he did not have anything to say to Barksdale’s family “right now.”
Following the sentencing, Boykin and several friends and family members gathered behind the courthouse to release balloons in Barksdale’s honor. Many of them wore white t-shirts bearing a picture of Brayden riding a toy tractor. The backs of the shirts read, “Riding the Rainbow for Justice.” Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office deputies and representatives from the District Attorney’s Office signed balloons and released them as well.
Neither Boykin nor Jeffrey Barksdale wanted to comment to The Dispatch following the sentencing.
During the hearing, Lisa Richardson, a relative of Barksdale’s, took the stand to ask Boykin why she left Barksdale with Chambers and said the only reason Boykin had custody of Barksdale in the first place was because a chancery judge, whom she did not name, did not want Jeffrey Barksdale to have custody because he is confined to a wheelchair.
“The reason they took him away from him on paper is because he was in that chair,” she sobbed.
Several members of Boykin’s family began murmuring and whispering at this, but Kitchens told Richardson that now was the time to address Chambers, not anyone else.
He added that judges make decisions in court everyday.
“Sometimes we wish we have decisions that we can make over again,” he said.
According to Chancery Court records, Chancery Judge Jim Davidson awarded Boykin custody in 2014. Though his final judgment makes clear that he believed it would be difficult for Jeffrey Barksdale, who was injured in a car accident around the time Barksdale was born, to take care of a child because of his disability, the judgment also said Jeffrey Barksdale had a prior felony charge, as did both his sister and brother-in-law who he lived with.
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