By Jessica Caird
Assistant District Attorney in Harris County
The proverbial white whale of my career as an appellate prosecutor has been the Cameron Moon murder trial. I have assisted the trial prosecutors on retrial since 2015, and I was lucky enough to be part of the trial team in 2024 to see Moon retried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. It took a number of years, but justice may finally stand for Christopher Seabreak, whom Moon murdered, and his still-grieving family.
Although I did not handle Moon v. State on its original appeal in 2010, the decision that came from the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2014 rocked the world of juvenile prosecutors and juvenile judges, as well as gave new trials to numerous serious, certified juvenile offenders in Harris County. I dealt with a number of those Moon reversals from 2015 until the Court of Criminal Appeals overruled Moon in 2021.[1]
Nevertheless, even as the Court finally overturned Moon, the retrial remained untried.[2] From the end of 2014 through the middle of 2024, Cameron Moon walked the streets of Harris and Montgomery Counties on bond awaiting retrial for the murder. During that time, Mr. Moon entered into relationships, had a child, shot himself with a hunting rifle, and even crashed his vehicle while intoxicated (and then ran from the scene)—all while the case remained pending, mostly on an endless pretrial writ of habeas corpus appeal.
The murder
In 2008, 16-year-old Cameron Moon shot 20-year-old Chris Seabreak in the parking lot of a Gerland’s Food Town in Deer Park. Moon had planned, along with a friend, to set up a fake marijuana deal to steal $400 in cash from Chris and his cousin. Moon and his friend lured Chris and his cousin to a trailer park in hopes that Chris would give a girl they recruited the money without turning over the (nonexistent) marijuana. Chris and his cousin refused to pay the money without first getting the weed.
When his plan failed, Moon changed the plan. He got a gun. He kept contacting Chris and his cousin and convinced them to meet in the Gerland’s parking lot to complete the deal. What Chris and his cousin didn’t know was that Moon had no drugs and no intention of letting them walk away with their money. It was all a set-up.
When Chris approached Moon in the parking lot for the exchange, Moon pulled a gun on him. Moon fired the first shot at close range and three more as Chris ran from him. Chris died in the parking lot with four gunshot wounds as his cousin held him.
The appeals
The State originally tried Moon in 2010 as a certified juvenile in criminal district court. The State sought certification because of the seriousness of the offense, Moon’s role in the offense, his juvenile history, and the evidence demonstrating he was the leader of the plot to rob and ultimately kill Chris Seabreak. At the time he killed Chris, Moon was on probation for criminal mischief, demonstrating that rather than improve his behavior while serving out the terms of his juvenile probation, he planned and committed a murder.
Texas Family Code §54.02(a) at the time required the juvenile court to make an assessment of a juvenile respondent—whether to try him as a juvenile or certify him as an adult—after a full investigation and hearing. Under subsection (a), the judge had to decide if probable cause existed that the juvenile committed the offense and whether, “because of the seriousness of the offense alleged or the background of the child, the welfare of the community require[d] criminal proceedings.” In reaching that decision, the law required the judge to consider four factors:
1) whether the juvenile committed the offense against a person or property,
2) the sophistication and maturity of the child,
3) the record and previous history of the child, and
4) the prospects of adequate protection of the public and the likelihood of rehabilitation using the procedures, services, and facilities available to the juvenile court.[3]
The State relied heavily on the seriousness of the offense and Moon’s background during the hearing. Moon countered with his own psychiatric expert who claimed he would be amenable to rehabilitation and was not prone to violence.[4] But the State explained that there was little time to rehabilitate Moon because the juvenile court’s jurisdiction expired at age 18 or 19, depending on the type of petition, and even a Texas Youth Commission sentence ended at 19.
The judge ended up certifying Moon as an adult, he went to trial, a jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Back then, certified juveniles could not complain about the certification process until after a conviction,[5] so it became part of the criminal appeal.
In 2013, the First Court of Appeals reversed his conviction for legally and factually insufficient evidence that rendered the juvenile court’s certification order an abuse of discretion.[6] It held that the evidence of Moon’s sophistication and maturity was legally insufficient;[7] it also held that factually insufficient evidence supported the juvenile court’s finding that the prospect of adequate protection of the public and low likelihood of rehabilitation in the juvenile system supported certification.[8] In an unusual turn, the First Court declared that the case remained pending in the juvenile court—despite the criminal trial—as it had never left the juvenile court’s jurisdiction.[9]
Harris County sought discretionary review, and the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the reversal but on a slightly different ground. It held that the certification order failed to confer jurisdiction because it lacked sufficient factual findings.[10] The Court also decided the case remained pending in the juvenile court, and it suggested using Texas Family Code §54.02(j) to recertify.[11] By now, Moon was more than 22 years old, so the juvenile court could only certify or dismiss the prosecution.
The juvenile court recertified Moon in May 2015, and the case went to a criminal district court for retrial. The same team of pro bono lawyers who handled his direct appeals tried to avoid recertification and then retrial. They fought tooth and nail with motions complaining about jurisdiction and demanding dismissal, a mandamus, and then a pretrial writ of habeas corpus.
Between four and six pro bono attorneys worked for Moon beginning before the first certification hearing in 2008. The first to jump on was the mother of Moon’s childhood friend, who felt a personal connection to the youth. She brought in a federal criminal attorney, a law professor, and various other lawyers and associates over the years. The first lawyer’s connection was clearly with Moon himself, but the others joined in the hopes of changing juvenile law to make it significantly more difficult to certify even violent juvenile offenders. If a youthful offender is left in the juvenile system, potential sentences are lower and avenues for early release more plentiful and likely. These attorneys went on to push through the legislative change allowing for immediate appeal of a certification order through the civil appellate courts during the 2015 legislative session.
As a former juvenile prosecutor and an appellate prosecutor responding to many reversals on serious violent offenses from murder to capital murder, I felt strongly that the law must still hold Moon accountable for his conduct. He should not get a pass simply because he was young—so was his victim. Youth is not an excuse for murder, and it shouldn’t provide a pass on bearing the consequences for murder. Moon’s conduct and the evidence supported certification, and by now, certification was our only option to hold him accountable for killing Chris.
I provided caselaw and motions backup on most of those filings. In 2017, the pro bonos filed a lengthy pretrial writ of habeas corpus raising jurisdictional and constitutional complaints. I wrote the State’s answer and argued the merits, and the trial court denied relief in October 2018. Moon appealed.
The First Court received jurisdiction over the expedited appeal in November 2018. I argued the case in October 2019, and the Court issued an initial opinion affirming the denial of habeas relief in February 2020. I first spoke to and began to get to know Chris’s mother before and after that oral argument.
The pro bonos sought rehearing. The justices delayed issuing the rehearing decision for more than two years—on an accelerated appeal. During that time, the Court of Criminal Appeals expressly overruled Moon v. State.[12]
I filed a motion to expedite, and the Court denied it. I filed an additional brief explaining that the overturning of Moon defeated the claims raised in the habeas application. With the approval of District Attorney Kim Ogg, I moved to mandamus the First Court to force a decision—any decision—as the case moldered.[13] Six days after seeking mandamus relief from the Court of Criminal Appeals, the panel issued an opinion reversing the habeas court and ordering the indictment dismissed (never to be retried).[14] The State sought discretionary review, which the Court of Criminal Appeals granted in September 2022. Finally, in May 2023, the Court of Criminal Appeals ordered the First Court to dismiss the writ appeal, not the indictment, opening the way after five years to a retrial.[15]
The preparation for retrial
By now, as you can tell, I felt invested. I had spent nearly 10 years trying to address the injustice of the Moon appeals and the unconscionable delays that resulted. I spoke frequently with Chris’s mother, and I felt that I had to do everything in my power to see justice done for her and Chris. I did not believe that I could simply walk away no matter how capable the trial prosecutor who took over the case. Although I had not been in trial since 2007—the year before Cameron Moon murdered Chris Seabreak—I wanted to be part of the trial team on this case, but we needed someone far more experienced than I to lead the team. Enter Sarah Seely, the Division Chief of the Homicide Division, who is one of Harris County’s most talented, diligent, and determined prosecutors. I couldn’t have asked for a better lead prosecutor. And, to her immense credit, I didn’t have to ask. She offered.
By now nearly 16 years had passed since the murder, Moon was 32 years old, and much of the technology had changed. We had VHS tapes that needed conversion to a digital format. Most of the evidence came from early cell phones. (Do you remember the original Sidekick with the sliding keyboard? What about T9 keypads where you had to press the 2 button three times to type the letter “c”?) Those were the types of phones and messages we had in evidence. The phones were so old no one could download them. Back in 2008, former DA Investigator Mike Kelly painstakingly scrolled through each text, took a photograph of it, and then moved to the next. But when he took those photographs, no one had asked him to scroll down to get the date and time of the outgoing messages. We had to get another forensic analyst in our office, Stephen Clappart, to go through the 16-year-old phone. Fortunately, it still worked, and he found those timestamps.
The 2008 investigation and prosecution did not lend itself to 2016 standards. The State charged and tried it as a murder despite it clearly being a capital murder. The first trial predated Miller v. Alabama,[16] a 2012 decision saying certified juveniles convicted of capital murder could not receive a mandatory sentence of life without parole; before this decision, when Moon was first tried, it was much more difficult to certify and prosecute a 16-year-old. We wanted to avoid claims of prosecutorial vindictiveness, so it seemed too late to indict for capital after the past trial, conviction, and two appeals.
Add to it that this was the homicide investigator’s first murder case (because murders don’t happen often in Deer Park). Back then, no one sought out the girl from the trailer park who tried to get Chris and his cousin to hand her the cash, even though her number and photograph sat in one of the cell phones. In the first trial, the State called the co-defendant and the uncharged driver as witnesses. They did not testify well, and they claimed to remember little 16 years later. The 17-year-old co-defendant who provided the gun received a 25-year prison sentence after Moon’s first trial despite testifying for the State. He was still in prison on the murder Moon (the shooter) was on bond for 16 years later. The co-defendant would not cooperate in a retrial.
With the problems mounting, the trial team went to work. That team included an experienced homicide investigator, Juan Viramontes, and the best paralegal I’ve had the pleasure of working with in my long career, Matilde Falcon. Ms. Falcon performed more investigation 16 years after the murder than Deer Park police did in 2008. She found the missing girl through her reviews of the cell phone evidence, and with the help of Investigator Viramontes, the team tracked her down. That witness met with us, reluctantly, 16 years after she tried to get Chris to give her the money. Nevertheless, though the patience and persistence of ADA Seely and Investigator Viramontes, she opened up and even testified in the retrial—a missing piece from the first trial that supported how the events transpired when neither co-actor testified.
Next came many a meeting to discuss how to present the old-fashioned text evidence in a way that modern-day jurors could read and comprehend. The photographs were old and the style of the text (gray font on black screen) very hard to read. After we had the forensic analyst create a spreadsheet of times for each incoming and outgoing text so we weren’t fumbling in the dark to recreate the conversations, an intern typed each text into a PowerPoint presentation. That presentation showed that Moon came up with the plan, he pestered his co-defendant to help him, and he hounded Chris and his cousin to participate in the marijuana deal. Just organizing and putting the text messages in a format for easy review that looked more familiar (green and blue bubbles, of course) simplified the evidence and made the story clear.
Then there was additional punishment evidence to track down. The “accidental shooting,” where Moon had shot himself with a rifle during the decade he was out on bond, had us meeting with the neighbor who called it in. She reported hearing frequent verbal and some physical fights coming from the home Moon shared with an ex-girlfriend in 2018. This neighbor even saw Moon push his girlfriend into a tree. We tracked down and met with the girlfriend, who unsurprisingly denied any violence, but she admitted Moon somehow managed to shoot himself as she tried to take the gun from him during one of their domestic disputes.
The team met with the driver of the car Moon hit while intoxicated in 2021. Photographs taken during that arrest showed Moon still had prison tattoos, including one with the California Penal Code Section for murder (187) and another that said, “Play now, pay later.” More useful punishment evidence.
Although we had records of misbehavior in juvenile detention and in the prison system, most of those witnesses could not be located, and the ones we did find were uncooperative. Having gathered as much of the available evidence as we could and formatting it in as jury-friendly a manner as possible, the team felt ready.
The trial
Almost 16 years after the murder, within a few weeks of the anniversary of Chris’s death, the team headed to court to retry Cameron Moon. The trial occurred in one of Harris County’s Emergency Relief Docket (ERD) Courts with a visiting judge, in less-than-ideal conditions. The ERD Courts are additional trial courts (with retired judges) to work down the backlog created by a flooded courthouse in 2017 from Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic. The courthouse used for ERD sits across the street from our offices in the old Family Law Center, requiring a team of investigators to truck over the nine boxes of evidence, law, and the record each morning in the July heat. The victim-witness room where the family sat for more than a week had a drainage tube (which continued to leak) strung down from the ceiling into a large trashcan, along with old discarded furniture. It provided none of the comforts of home or even our usual courthouse, but Chris’s family showed up every day and sat in the courtroom or that victim-witness room to show their support.
The trial commenced with the same defense attorney who had tried the case originally. He and one of the pro bono attorneys fought hard for their client, setting up from voir dire that the age of the case and the age of the defendant at the time of offense should lead to an acquittal, or at least a lenient sentence. The defense claimed self-defense, but Chris’s cousin withstood grueling cross-examination for hours to make clear that he saw Moon empty the gun into Chris as Chris ran away. Another eyewitness, a woman just doing her grocery shopping, corroborated his account. And Moon’s recorded statement did little to support his self-defense claim.
The forensic analyst and the long-retired investigator who photographed the texts testified to the timestamps and which phones the texts came from. ADA Seely and paralegal Falcon turned the most relevant texts into stickers and pasted them onto a large posterboard during the direct examination of the lead investigator, cementing in the jurors’ minds the events leading up to the murder. It provided a clear visual for the jury to follow. After a show-stopping closing argument from ADA Seely, the jury returned a guilty verdict in under an hour. We reached punishment!
Punishment
The jury recessed for the weekend after hearing the State’s punishment evidence, and everyone assumed the jury would sentence Moon before the end of the day on Monday. But no, Hurricane Beryl barreled into Houston Monday morning, delaying trial. We hoped to resume Tuesday, but the extent of the damage kept the courthouse closed to visitors. Finally, Wednesday morning, the jury returned to hear the defense’s punishment evidence. It was a little later than expected because the bailiff had to walk a juror through opening her garage door when she (like the rest of us) was without electricity at her house.
The defense put on everything they had, including the ex-girlfriend we chose not to call. They also called Moon’s current girlfriend, who is the mother of his 2-year-old special needs son and his 8-year-old special needs stepson, to testify that he was a kind and patient father. Many of his former employers, coworkers, and friends testified as well. He made a convincing case that he had changed.
I gave the punishment closing argument and finally got to say some of the things I’d been thinking all these years. Moon had had over nine years of relative freedom despite a jury finding him guilty of murder. Instead of turning his life around and treating every day of that freedom as a gift—a reprieve—he continued to hurt people. He hurt people while on bond, while pretrial services monitored him, and after serving more than seven years behind bars. What would he do when we weren’t watching him any longer? What had he learned that made him safe to be in the community? In contrast, Chris’s mom still spent every day, every holiday, missing her son. Her health had deteriorated significantly over the years as she continued to mourn. Moon’s conduct took her peace of mind and in many ways her freedom as the grief fundamentally changed her life and the way she parented her other children.
The jury returned with 25 years’ prison time. It felt like a disappointment to the family and the trial team, but in light of the age of the case and the punishment evidence, it likely was a fair result. And when Chris’s mother gave her victim impact statement, telling Moon what he took from her, I believe he finally understood, hearing it now as a father himself. For the first time in all these years, Moon apologized for killing Chris. He hadn’t expressed any regret in 2010, nor did he on the occasions he ran into Chris’s mother here and there while he was out on bond. After all these years, he finally realized that what he took away, he could not return. He forever changed Chris’s family.
And this experience also changed me. I got to be part of a team who works every day to see justice done on the most serious of cases. I watched the compassion and care put into every phase of the trial, and the kindness showed to each witness no matter how uncooperative. Seeing the trial from this perspective—not just in a reporter’s record—reminded me why we do this job even when the task seems Sisyphean. It might take a decade or more, but nothing feels better than knowing you helped a family get justice—at last—for someone they love.
Although the fight is not over yet—Moon has appealed (again)—Harris County prosecutors will keep fighting to see justice stands for Chris and Chris’s family, no matter how long it takes.
Endnotes
[1] See Moon v. State, 451 S.W.3d 28 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014); but see Ex parte Thomas, 623 S.W.3d 370 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021) (overruling Moon).
[2] See Thomas, 623 S.W.3d at 378; but see Ex parte Moon, 649 S.W.3d 700 (Tex. App—Houston [1st Dist.] 2022), rev’d by 667 S.W.3d 796 (Tex. Crim. App. 2023).
[3] Tex. Fam. Code §54.02(f).
[4] Moon v. State, 410 S.W.3d 366, 369-70 (Tex. App—Houston [1st Dist.] 2013), aff’d by 451 S.W.3d 28 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014).
[5] See Tex. Code Crim. Proc. Art. 44.47.
[6] Moon v. State, 410 S.W.3d 366 (Tex. App—Houston [1st Dist.] 2013), aff’d by 451 S.W.3d 28 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014).
[7] Id. at 378.
[8] Id.
[9] Moon, 410 S.W.3d at 378 (“Because the juvenile court abused its discretion in waiving its jurisdiction over Moon and certifying him for trial as an adult, the district court lacked jurisdiction over this case. We therefore vacate the district court’s judgment and dismiss the case. The case remains pending in the juvenile court”).
[10] Moon v. State, 451 S.W.3d 28 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014).
[11] Moon v. State, 451 S.W.3d 28, 52 n. 90 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014) (holding the case remained pending in the juvenile court with a possible alternative of certification under Tex. Fam. Code §54.02(j)).
[12] See Ex parte Thomas, 623 S.W.3d 370 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021) (“Given Moon’s strained reasoning, its inconsistency with related decisions, and the legal developments since the decision, we explicitly overrule it”). Harris County Assistant District Attorney Kristin Assad handled that post-conviction writ of habeas corpus and managed to do what I had not despite my numerous attempts. ADA Assad convinced the Court of Criminal Appeals that it had misread and misunderstood Texas Family Code §54.02(h)’s requirements when it demanded that all factual findings supporting the order be included in the written waiver order. See id.
[13] See In re State ex rel Ogg, WR-93,783-01 (Tex. Crim. App. Jun. 8, 2022) (filed May 6, 2022, accepted May 11, 2022, with leave to file denied on June 8, 2022).
[14] Ex parte Moon, 649 S.W.3d 700 (Tex. App—Houston [1st Dist.] 2022), rev’d by 667 S.W.3d 796 (Tex. Crim. App. 2023).
[15] Ex parte Moon, 667 S.W.3d 796, 805 (Tex. Crim. App. 2023).
[16] Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012).