The Ector County Sheriff’s Office is investigating after a 19-year-old Odessa man was shot to death Monday night and a 16-year-old boy with gunshot wounds was dropped off at Odessa Regional Medical Center by an unknown female.
During a press conference Tuesday, Sheriff Mike Griffis said it appears as though Jeremiah Nathaniel Padilla was at his residence in the 13000 block of Firewater Trail when he went outside to greet a pickup truck around 6 p.m.
“There was apparently was a communication, a conversation that transpired and at some point somebody pulled a gun and shots were fired,” Griffis said.
Padilla was taken to Medical Center Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries and an unnamed 16-year-old who was in the pickup truck was taken to Odessa Regional Medical Center by an unknown female, Griffis said.
The teenager “is not in a condition where he can talk to us,” Griffis said. “Hopefully if he gets in a condition where he can talk to us, he will. We sure would like to talk to him, but there’s a good chance he won’t.”
The boy is not under guard and investigators are waiting for hospital staff to alert them if he becomes conscious and alert, Griffis said.
There was a large gathering at the house at the time of the shooting, but there was only one juvenile witness to the fatal shooting and his story has not yet been corroborated, Griffis said.
Detectives have found the pickup truck and crime scene technicians are processing it for evidence, but they did find shell casings from two caliber weapons at the scene and inside the truck, Griffis said.
The witness said a girl was in the pickup truck with the 16-year-old, but it’s unclear if she is the one who dropped him off at the hospital, Griffis said. It’s also unclear if there were additional people in the truck and who among them fired the rounds that killed Padilla, he said.
“The individual who dropped the subject off did not hang around and we’re vigorously trying to find that individual right now,” Griffis said. “We have very little to go on right now. It is a female.”
The sheriff said he is concerned that over the last few years, the ages of shooting victims and suspects have been increasingly getting lower.
