A Spotsylvania County man was arrested Tuesday and charged with second-degree murder, malicious wounding and two counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony three days after the shooting death of a Massaponax High School senior.
Tyler Butler, 27, is being held at Rappahannock Regional Jail under no bond.
Deputies responded to the 2700 block of McKenzie Lane in the River Club subdivision early Saturday morning and discovered that Michael Bosworth Jr., 18, had been shot in the torso, and a juvenile was grazed by a bullet and had a minor wound. A third teen was unharmed.
Bosworth, a member of the lacrosse, football and wrestling teams at Massaponax, later died at Mary Washington Hospital.
Initial reports of the shooting indicated the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call of a residential burglary in progress at 3 a.m., and that the resident fired shots at the alleged attempted intruders.
A search warrant, however, revealed that one of the teens told detectives they were playing a game called “ding-dong ditch” in which pranksters ring someone’s doorbell and run, so that when the resident arrives, no one is on the doorstep. They had pranked other houses in the neighborhood, recorded the pranks on their phone and uploaded the videos to TikTok, the teen said.
The teen added that while they were running away to hide, a man shot at them. There are no claims from authorities that the teens were armed.
Butler has a May 14 hearing scheduled in Hampton General District Court on an unrelated misdemeanor charge of violation of a protective order.
