A 4-year-old boy found dead on a Dallas residential street over the weekend was reported missing four hours after his body was found in a pool of blood eight blocks from his home.
An early-morning jogger found the body of Cash Gernon in the middle of Saddleridge Drive at about 7 a.m. Saturday, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
Cash and his twin brother were living at a home on Florina Parkway in Dallas’s Mountain Creek area with Monica Sherrod, originally reported to be the boys’ mother but who is actually their father’s girlfriend. The boys’ father, who was not named, has not been in the home since March, police said, and they don’t know where he is, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Sherrod called police at just before 11 a.m. to report Cash missing and showed police home security footage showing a man lift a sleeping child out of a crib at about 5 a.m. and carry him away. Sherrod identified the man as 18-year-old Darriynn Brown, who lived a few blocks away, according to an affidavit filed in the case.
Brown has been charged with kidnapping and burglary and is being held in lieu of a $1.5 million bail. Authorities say more charges are anticipated when a forensic analysis is complete.
The arrest affidavit did not describe Brown’s relationship with Cash or his family, and Sherrod told ABC 8 that Brown had no relationship with the boy. But Kameron Mori, 18 — who lives at the home where Cash lived — told the Morning News he was Cash’s brother and had been friends with Brown in high school and middle school.
”Friends ain’t nothing,” Mori said. “Evil. No reason. Literally, no reason.”
Brown’s mother, who identified herself as Mimi Brown, told the Morning News that her son had been home all weekend.
”That’s not right at all,” she said. “I know my son is traumatized. I know he’s scared, because I’m scared.”
Meanwhile, Cash’s twin brother, who was not named, was taken from Sherrod’s home by state authorities, she said. Dallas police said the boy was now with his biological mother, Melinda Seagroves, and grandmother, Connie Ward, who had been searching for the boys for some time. Seagroves had believed they were with their father and had no idea he had left them with Sherrod.
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[Feature Photo: Cash Gernon/ABC screenshot & Darriyn Brown/Dallas County Jail]
