Investigators say witness accounts and a renewed review changed a 2018 drowning case into a homicide prosecution.
SHANNON COUNTY, Mo. — Nearly eight years after 20-year-old Robbie Crites died in Missouri’s Jacks Fork River, authorities have charged three men with second-degree murder, saying a case once treated as an accidental drowning was reopened and reworked into a homicide investigation.
The arrests matter because they mark a sharp reversal in a rural death investigation that had long stalled. Sheriff’s investigators say they reopened the case in early 2025, reviewed the original evidence and found new information that pointed away from an accident and toward a coordinated attack. Zachary D. Watson, Ronald D. Brawley III and Austin D. Womack are now jailed on cash-only bonds, and the case has revived long-running questions about what happened along the river on June 16, 2018.
The case turned publicly on March 5, when the Shannon County Sheriff’s Office announced what it called a major development in the death of Crites, who was 20 when he was found in the river near Eminence in the Ozarks. Authorities said the case had first been ruled a drowning. The sheriff’s office said that after reopening the file at the beginning of 2025, investigators carried out an extensive review of the original investigation, the known evidence and the circumstances around the death. Sheriff Steven Hogan said in a statement that “the facts did not add up,” and that investigators refused to leave the matter closed. By the time the arrests were announced, authorities were no longer describing the death as a misfortune on the water. They were describing it as a killing that had gone unpunished for seven and a half years.
The charging picture that emerged is more violent than the original ruling suggested. According to criminal case accounts described in follow-up reporting, investigators allege the defendants acted with another person or persons to cause serious physical injury to Crites, physically assaulted him, wrapped him in fishing line and dumped him into the river, causing him to drown. Witness statements in the probable cause record became central to that shift. One witness said Womack responded to a confrontation weeks after the death by saying he killed Crites because Crites owed him money for dope. Another witness said Womack later described the attack at a bonfire in Winona, including claims that he struck Crites with a fishing pole, beat him and kicked him into the water. Authorities have also said multiple witnesses placed Watson near the river that day with another man. Public reports do not fully explain what direct physical evidence, if any, was newly developed during the reopened investigation, and court records available through media reports do not resolve every gap in the timeline.
The setting has shaped the case from the start. Eminence is a small Ozarks town known for river access, floating trips and outdoor recreation, and the Jacks Fork is the kind of place where an accidental drowning can seem plausible at first glance. That backdrop helps explain why the original ruling carried weight. But it also raised the stakes once the sheriff’s office said the death was not accidental. In rural counties, old cases often depend on whether witnesses later talk, whether investigators revisit assumptions and whether local authorities can reframe a death after years of silence. Crites’ family never accepted the first explanation. In 2020, his mother publicly said she would not give up on getting justice for her son. That persistence became part of the case’s public history long before arrests were made.
Now the legal process moves into a more familiar stage. Watson, Brawley and Womack have each been charged with second-degree murder, a Class A felony under the accounts cited by regional outlets, and each has been held on a $250,000 cash-only bond. Public reporting at the time of the arrests did not clearly show whether the men had entered pleas or whether attorneys had made detailed court arguments on their behalf. The sheriff’s office has said the investigation remains ongoing, which leaves open the possibility of more witnesses, more records or additional charges if prosecutors decide the evidence supports them. The next milestones are likely to be first appearances, bond review questions if any are filed, and the release of fuller court documents that show how prosecutors intend to prove intent, participation and causation in a death that was once categorized very differently.
Even in the brief public record, the language around the case carries the weight of lost time. Hogan said “a child’s life was taken,” though Crites was 20 when he died, framing the announcement less as a routine filing than as the correction of an old failure. That tone matched the sheriff’s appeal for more information, with the office urging people to come forward even if they think what they know is small. The case also carries the plain detail of place: a riverbank, fishing gear, a summer day in 2018 and a body later said to have been found in water. Those facts made the death seem settled for years. Now they form the scene of an allegation that the river was used not as the cause of death alone, but as the final step in a group assault. That distinction is what will define the prosecution as the case moves ahead.
For now, the case stands at the charging stage, with three men jailed and investigators still seeking information as prosecutors begin testing whether an old drowning can be proved in court as murder.
Author note: Last updated April 1, 2026.