DeBrandon Charles, 27, a Black male from Brenham, was shot on the morning of September 29, 2025, in the 2400 block of Jaguar Drive on Bryan’s west side. Officers responding around 6:10 a.m. found him wounded; they performed lifesaving measures before he was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Early statements from authorities described the incident as isolated while detectives began piecing together what happened in the pre-dawn hours.
As days passed, investigators identified a single suspect: 20-year-old Cado Sakai Traylor of Brenham. On October 13, Bryan police obtained a warrant charging Traylor with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the shooting that killed Charles. At the time the warrant was issued, Traylor was already in the Washington County Jail on unrelated matters, having been booked there on October 3. Local outlets reported that he was being held while authorities pursued the new charge tied to the Jaguar Drive homicide.
Subsequent reporting detailed Traylor’s legal status beyond the Bryan case. Court records described by area media show he pleaded guilty on October 9 to a separate aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Washington County, an unrelated incident that nevertheless kept him in custody while Bryan detectives advanced their homicide investigation. Coverage also noted that he was listed on the jail roster with multiple aggravated-assault counts, distinct from the fatal shooting of Charles.
The violence reverberated among Charles’s family, who publicly questioned why the man accused in his death had been free on bond for an earlier violent offense prior to the shooting, calling for scrutiny of the circumstances that allowed him to be in the community. Their appeals unfolded alongside the continuing police inquiry, which, by mid-October, centered on Traylor as the lone suspect in the case.
Charles’s killing was also recorded in regional gun-violence databases and memorial pages, which confirmed his identity, age, and the date and location of the shooting. Those listings echoed the timeline released by police and the local press as the investigation moved from the immediate response on September 29 to the identification of a suspect two weeks later.
