Parents often warn their children about the dangers posed by strangers; however, in this day and age, the same can sometimes be said for those who purport to be a child’s friends. Murder has no bounds, a terribly cruel lesson learned by 16-year-old Ashton Glover in the summer of 2006.
A student from Sugar Land, Texas, Ashton was active in the Future Farmers of America (FFA) at Clements High School. A visit to her MySpace page shows she had 213 friends. That same site listed her interests as the FFA, football games and music.
Ashton was like any teenager, full of hopes and dreams for the future, but all that came to an end on July 7, 2006.
On that day, Ashton met two friends, Matthew Ross McCombs, 18, and Sean Huston Brown, 18, at a coffee shop on Sugar Land’s Sweetwater Boulevard. The trio eventually decided to go "mudding" in Brown’s truck and drove out to a field off Oilfield Road, south of Sugar Land. Unbeknownst to Ashton, her friends had other plans.
When they arrived at their destination, the three friends exited the vehicle and began exploring the area. Brown walked ahead, with Ashton in the middle and McCombs trailing behind. Suddenly, without warning, McCombs pulled a handgun from his waistband and shot Ashton in the head, killing her instantly.
McCombs and Brown went to a restaurant for breakfast and then returned to the coffee shop and drove Ashton’s vehicle to a spot on the street near her home. Afterward, they continued to cover up the grisly murder by returning to the crime scene and burying her body in a shallow grave at a nearby construction site. When they were finished, the two young men went home and drifted off to sleep.
Ashton was originally thought to be a missing person. When police asked McCombs and Brown if they knew her whereabouts, they claimed they had not seen her since they parted company and she entered a white pickup truck. Searchers scoured the area looking for any signs of the teenage girl. Three days later, a work crew returned to the construction site, and they were startled to discover Ashton’s partially buried body. Two hours later, when police went to McCombs’s home to question him again, he and Brown fled, but they were caught trying to cross into Canada at Port Huron, Mich. They were detained by Canadian Customs officials and Ontario Provincial Police, and held in Port Huron until extradition proceedings could begin.
McCombs waived extradition, but Brown refused to sign the papers. McCombs was brought back to Fort Bend County for further questioning, while Brown remained in Port Huron until he was forced to return. Brown denied any knowledge of McCombs’ intent to kill Ashton, and McCombs corroborated his story. During questioning, McCombs admitted to shooting Ashton. The story quickly took a bizarre twist when investigators learned the motive behind the murder.
