photo by: Contributed

Brianna Higgins

A Kansas City teen was sentenced on Friday to the maximum sentence for the murder of a 15-year-old Lawrence girl after he shot her in the head while playing with firearms.

The teen, Davon D. Washington, 17, of Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty in May in Johnson County Juvenile Court to one felony count of second-degree unintentional but reckless murder and one misdemeanor count of a juvenile in possession of a firearm.

The conviction is in connection with an incident on Jan. 19 near the 16900 block of West 127th Street in Olathe when Washington and another man were tossing guns from the front seat of a parked car into the backseat and “dry firing” them while 15-year-old Brianna Higgins, of Lawrence, was sitting in the driver seat. At some point, one of the guns was loaded with a live round, unbeknownst to Washington, before he pointed it at Higgins head and pulled the trigger, as the Journal-World reported.

Higgins, a sophomore at Lawrence High School, was shot and was then driven to Olathe Medical Center around 11 p.m.; she was declared dead a short time later. Brianna’s older sister, Iona Wakole,told the Journal-World after Higgin’s death that Higiins was a “loyal person and a beautiful soul,” who “would have done everything in her power to make sure that her friends were OK.”

As part of a plea agreement, Washington agreed to be sentenced as a juvenile and as an adult under court’s Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Prosecution (EJJP) which allows the court to impose both the juvenile sentence and the adult sentence at the same time. The state had originally intended to try him as an adult if the case had gone to trial.

Washington will serve his juvenile sentence in custody until he is 22.5 followed by a six mont after care period but if he fails to comply with the conditions of the juvenile sentence until he is 23-years-old he will be ordered to serve his adult sentence of 123 months, just over 10 years in prison.