Jury sentences man to 8 years for trailer park shooting

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A Bowie County jury sentenced a 21-year-old man to 8 years in prison Friday for shooting a firearm in a trailer park on a Sunday afternoon last year.

Assistant District Attorney Katie Carter argued that Treace Shipp put many lives in danger the afternoon of Nov. 1, 2020, when he fired bullets that deflated a tire and entered a child’s bedroom, hitting the headboard of a bunk bed.

Shipp went on trial this week in New Boston at the Bowie County courthouse for two charges of deadly conduct and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Shipp was breaking windows and causing significant damage to his grandmother’s trailer on Parkway Drive in the Wake Village area when a good samaritan stopped his truck to help. Shipp and the man got into a physical altercation in the yard of the trailer and Shipp managed to gain possession of a firearm the man had in his possession but had not drawn.

Shipp’s girlfriend threw the firearm into a wooded area after it fell from the man’s holster during the struggle. Shipp was able to retrieve the weapon and use it to shoot the man in the hand who stopped to assist Shipp’s grandmother, according to court records. Shipp then fired two additional rounds from the pistol as the man fled from him.

One round struck the tire of a man who was visiting family in the neighborhood and the other went through the side of a trailer and into a child’s bedroom, breaking an aquarium and passing through a wooden headboard on a lower bunk bed. Carter said that if the boy who usually slept there had been in bed the bullet might have struck the child in the head.

Shipp was sentenced to 8 years in prison on each count of deadly conduct and to 2 years for being a felon in possession of a firearm. The sentences will run concurrently as they occurred in a single criminal episode. The maximum possible sentence on each charge was 10 years.

Shipp pleaded guilty to burglary of a building in 2019 and was serving a five-year term of felony probation in Bowie County at the time of the shooting.

Fifth District Judge Bill Miller presided over the trial. Assistant Public Defender Bart Craytor represented Shipp.

Shipp will remain in the Bowie County jail until he is transferred to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to serve his time in prison.

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