Eighteen-year-old Ash Cooper, formerly Joshua Cooper, was sentenced to 15 to 40 years in a Pennsylvania state prison after pleading guilty to murdering a 12-year-old girl in November 2022.
NBC Philadelphia reported that the deceased girl, Morgan Connors, was shot and killed at the “Top of the Ridge Trailer Park on Gibson Road in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.”
Attention was drawn to Cooper after one of his friends called to say Cooper had used an Instagram chat to say he had killed someone and needed help getting rid of the body. “The legs and feet of someone covered in blood” were visible in the video chat.
The Buck County District Attorney’s Office revealed that Cooper had manipulated the lock on his father’s gun safe to get his hands on the firearm used in the murder. He “[replaced] the batteries his father had removed to make the combination lock inoperable.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Bucks County Court Judge Jeffrey L. Finley commenting on Connors’ death, saying, “It’s a horrible tragedy, a tragedy no family should ever have to undergo.”
In a statement, Connors’ adoptive father said, “A parent should never have to bury a child…The human heart was not designed for such heartbreak.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.