A Tarrant County jury handed down the punishment for the teenager who shot and killed an Arlington Lamar High School student back in March. NBC 5’s Alicia Barrera has reaction and the judge’s words for the juvenile.
A juvenile who fatally shot another student outside Arlington Lamar High School earlier this year was sentenced to four decades behind bars on Thursday but could be paroled much sooner.
323rd District Judge Alex Kim read the jury's unanimous punishment Thursday afternoon, telling the now-convicted 16-year-old he'd been sentenced to 40 years behind bars.
The teen, who is not being named because he is a minor, faced a sentence between probation and up to 40 years in prison for the shooting death of Ja’Shawn Poirer - the most allowed under Texas law for a minor not tried as an adult.
Kim said the juvenile must serve a minimum period of confinement and that he cannot be paroled by the Texas Juvenile Justice Department for 10 years. However, Kim said after the sentence was read Thursday that a hearing will be held on the juvenile's 19th birthday, in roughly three years, to determine if he will be turned over to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to continue serving his sentence or if he'd be given probation with conditions and returned to society.
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If he's sent to the TDCJ to continue serving his time, he'd have to serve half of his sentence before again being considered for parole.
In lobbying Thursday for the maximum sentence, Assistant District Attorney Llody Whelchel asked the jury to send a message about being accountable for gun violence.
“How many school shootings do we have to have for us to get a clue? Send a message to the community that there is accountability for this kind of behavior," Whelchel told the jury. "He needs to be held accountable so we know we will be safe from him for the next 40 years."
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In June, Whelchel and ADA Lee Sorrells sought to certify the teen to stand trial as an adult. Kim denied the state's request and kept the youth in the juvenile court system.
"Students were terrified," Sorrells told the jury. "There's nothing more terrible or terrifying for a kid than sitting there at school and then getting shot, getting killed. … He set out to kill someone that day and he did."
Investigators said back in March, the then 15-year-old brought a shotgun to Lamar High School and fired into a crowd of students waiting outside on the steps before classes began.
Poirer – who had just moved to Arlington from Michigan at the beginning of the school year – was killed and another student was wounded.
While a motive has been debated in court proceedings over the last several months, detectives believe the two boys did not know each other.
The judge ordered the psychological evaluation on Sept. 11 to determine if the defendant was fit to stand trial. A hearing for the evaluation was held last week and the defendant was deemed competent.
Earlier this month the defendant's father was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Court documents had said the gun his son used in the shooting belonged to him.
