Facing 5 – 99 years or life in prison, Timothy Harris sat before a jury of his peers in Jefferson County Judge John Stevens’ Jefferson County Criminal District Court the week of June 12 to face judgment for a crime that detailed the attempted sexual assault of a young family member ending only after Harris shot the teen as she tried to escape his assault.
Harris’ jury, finding guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon/ family violence June 12, settled in for the penalty phase of the trial. Prosecutors presented to jurors that Harris shot a 13-year-old girl, a family member, that rebuffed his sexual advances in March 2020.
Detailed in a March 20, 2020, Port Arthur Police Department call for service, officers were dispatched to Sunset Way Apartments on Central Mall Drive at about 11:30 a.m. Dispatch informed officers there was a shooting with a suspect still on scene.
Just before officers arrived, the report detailed, dispatch was advised that the suspect was trying to leave the complex. Moving quickly to locate the suspect, identified as then-30-year-old Timothy Harris, PAPD officers rushed to the scene and located both the suspect and the 13-year-old shooting victim.
“Several times,” the police report recorded of the victim’s outcries, “she stated that a relative had shot her.”
Suffering from a gunshot wound to the lower part of her body, PAPD reported, the child was transported by EMS to a local hospital where she underwent emergency surgery. Harris was transported to the Jefferson County Jail, where he was held on a $150,000 bond for the aggravated assault charge.
Left near death, the victim recounted during testimony in Harris’ trial, she thought she was not going to make it out alive. Although only one bullet hit its mark, testimony and evidence presented in court supported allegations that Harris fired at the teen many times.
Harris, pleading for leniency in sentencing, claimed he made a mistake by smoking “fake weed,” a synthetic blend of controlled substance that impaired his mind and made him hallucinate. Harris said “demons” were partly to blame for the assault.
“I blacked out at one point,” Harris said, admitting to unindicted felonies including the purchase of illegal drugs and possession of a firearm by a felon, as well as not knowing what happened next. “I see the house in shambles.”
Harris said he thought he was shooting at unseen forces coming for him in his inebriated state. When he. Came to, he said, he found the victim lying on the ground, suffering a critical injury. Choosing not to call 911, Harris said he called his mother at the nail shop instead.
“I wasn’t trying to shoot her,” Harris said.
To the contrary, the victim said Harris used a laser pointer to target her with the firearm before pulling the trigger.
“She saw the laser first,” Jefferson County prosecutor Jimmy Hamm recounted of the victim’s statement. Then, as Hamm detailed, Harris shot – then shot again – then shot again…
Hamm, irritated that the family shared by both Harris and the victim chose to support the assailant, reeled against the lack of concern for the child shot by a grown man that chose to take dangerous drugs while possessing a dangerous weapon.
“He’s not the victim,” Hamm argued. “I get so upset when things like this happen.
“This (adult family member) shot that girl; then, this family abandons her.”
Hamm asked the jury to return a life sentence, only the second time he’s asked for such a stiff penalty, he said. A prison term of two years, as allowed under sentencing guidelines, was too lenient a term for the crime committed, Hamm argued. After brief deliberation, the jury returned with a sentence that imposes 75 years of incarceration in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.