Javier Smith pleaded guilty to second-degree reckless homicide after originally facing a more serious charge in Azoria Jones’ fatal shooting.
MILWAUKEE, Wis. — A criminal case that began with a first-degree reckless homicide charge against a 17-year-old ended with a reduced guilty plea and a 12-year prison sentence for the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Azoria Jones, bringing the prosecution to a close less than a year after her death.
Javier Smith pleaded guilty June 4 to second-degree reckless homicide in Jones’ Sept. 21, 2025, death. A Milwaukee County judge later sentenced him to 12 years in prison and six years of extended supervision. Smith had originally been charged with first-degree reckless homicide involving use of a dangerous weapon and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18. The weapons count was dismissed and read into the record when he entered his plea. The resolution replaced the possibility of a trial with Smith’s formal admission to the reduced homicide offense.
The final charge reflects how the case changed between Smith’s arrest and sentencing. When prosecutors first went to court in September 2025, they relied on a criminal complaint describing witness statements, Smith’s police interview and surveillance footage from a Milwaukee County Transit System bus. Investigators said those pieces of evidence contradicted significant parts of the account Smith initially gave about the shooting. His attorneys, meanwhile, argued during the early court proceedings that the gunfire was accidental rather than intentional.
At Smith’s first court appearance, defense attorney Christopher Donovan emphasized his client’s age and lack of a prior violent record and maintained that Jones’ death resulted from an accident. Court Commissioner Barry Phillips focused instead on what happened after the shot was fired. Phillips questioned why Smith left his wounded girlfriend rather than remaining with her and immediately explaining to arriving officers that he had accidentally discharged a firearm. That disagreement captured an issue that would remain central to the case: not whether Smith had ultimately acknowledged firing the gun, but how the shooting occurred and what his conduct afterward showed.
Smith’s early statements to police were not consistent, according to investigators. He initially denied being the shooter and denied owning a gun. At another point, he said he and Jones were walking when he heard a shot and ran. He later told detectives that a vehicle approached and he believed someone inside might open fire. Smith said he had a gun under his arm and that the weapon went off. During the interview, according to the complaint, he ultimately admitted that he fired the shot that struck Jones and said he believed she had been hit in the chest.
The prosecution had evidence separate from Smith’s statements. A Milwaukee County Transit System bus passed through the area as the teenagers walked on Silver Spring Drive. Its surveillance equipment recorded the sound of a gunshot at about 10:19 p.m., Jones falling and Smith leaning over her before running away, according to investigators. Police said the video did not show the other vehicle Smith described as approaching before the gun discharged. That discrepancy gave prosecutors a way to challenge his explanation using a recording created independently of both the defendant and the witnesses.
The prosecution also had testimony about the immediate aftermath. One neighborhood witness told police she saw Smith and Jones walking before she heard the shot. She said she then heard Jones in distress and Smith calling to her before he ran. Another witness reported hearing Jones cry out and then hearing Smith ask whether she was all right and tell her to wake up. Both accounts placed Smith beside Jones when she was wounded and described him leaving while she remained on the sidewalk.
Jones died at the scene. Initial reports from Milwaukee police said only that a person believed to be a teenager or young adult had been fatally shot near North 76th Street and West Silver Spring Drive shortly after 10:15 p.m. The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim the next day as 15-year-old Azoria Jones of Milwaukee and classified her death as a homicide. At that stage, police were still publicly seeking information and had not announced an arrest.
The investigation soon turned toward Smith because Jones’ family knew him as her boyfriend. One of her aunts also told police, according to the complaint, that Smith had previously pulled out a gun while the aunt was with the couple. Authorities did not have to rely only on family information to determine where Smith had been around the time of the shooting. His grandmother told investigators that Smith and Jones had been at her home shortly before the gunfire and had left together to pick up a food order around 10:15 p.m.
Smith returned to his grandmother’s home alone a few minutes later. According to the complaint, he claimed that someone had shot Jones and told his grandmother to call 911. The grandmother did so. That statement preceded the accounts Smith later gave detectives and was significant because it initially attributed the shooting to someone else. Investigators would eventually compare it with the bus recording, which they said showed no other car immediately around the teenagers just before the shot.
Police arrested Smith on Sept. 24 at a relative’s home. By then, loved ones had held a vigil for Jones near the area where she was killed. Prosecutors formally charged Smith days later. In addition to admitting during questioning that he fired the weapon, Smith told investigators that he had disposed of the gun. Reports describing the complaint said he claimed to have disassembled it and thrown it into a sewer, while detectives said his descriptions of where he discarded it varied.
Those allegations formed the factual background for the initial first-degree reckless homicide case. A reckless homicide prosecution does not require the state to present the shooting as a preplanned killing, and the defense’s accident argument therefore did not by itself resolve the criminal question. Prosecutors alleged that Smith’s handling of the firearm and the circumstances surrounding Jones’ death supported the more serious reckless-homicide charge filed at the outset. The eventual plea to second-degree reckless homicide represented a negotiated or reduced outcome from what the state originally filed.
The dismissed underage weapons count remained part of the court record at the plea hearing. Wisconsin court practice allows dismissed charges to be read in during a resolution when the parties agree to that treatment, but the conviction itself in Smith’s case is for second-degree reckless homicide. The distinction is important because early news reports described accusations that had not yet been proven, while the case now has a final conviction based on Smith’s guilty plea.
The legal progression also changed the way Smith could accurately be described. In September 2025, he was a charged defendant entitled to the presumption of innocence. Investigators alleged that he fired the fatal shot and prosecutors cited the transit video and his statements. By June 2026, Smith had personally entered a guilty plea to the reduced homicide charge. At sentencing, the court was therefore deciding punishment for an admitted offense rather than deciding whether prosecutors had proved the shooting at a trial.
The sentence divides Smith’s punishment into two stages. He must serve 12 years in prison and then six years under extended supervision. Extended supervision is part of Wisconsin’s sentencing structure and follows confinement in eligible felony cases. Public reports on the sentencing did not identify an additional pending criminal proceeding arising from Jones’ death, making the prison term and later supervision the central remaining legal consequences of the prosecution.
For Jones’ family, the court resolution followed months that began with far less certainty. On the night she died, police were responding to calls about a shooting and neighbors had only fragments of what occurred. In the days that followed, investigators gathered the witnesses’ accounts, identified Smith, reviewed the transit recording and questioned him. Prosecutors then transformed that evidence into formal charges, and the case proceeded through the courts until Smith abandoned a trial and pleaded guilty.
The final disposition is narrower than the case prosecutors initially filed but carries a substantial prison term. Smith is serving 12 years for second-degree reckless homicide and is scheduled to remain under state supervision for another six years after release. The plea and sentence end the question of criminal responsibility that dominated the court proceedings while leaving Jones’ death, at age 15, as the event around which the entire case was built.
Author note: Last updated September 21, 2026.