Man convicted in 1994 kidnapping of Texarkana girl sentenced to 28 months in federal prison

TEXARKANA, Texas–A man who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl in 1994 and sexually assaulted her along with a co-defendant will serve 10 more months in federal prison for violating the terms of his supervised release, on top of an 18-month sentence he received last month for failing to register as a sex offender.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Schroeder III entered a revocation judgment Tuesday against Timothy Earl Norris, 58, ordering that the 10 months run consecutively to the sentence in the registration case. Norris asked to serve his time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, according to the judgment.

Norris pleaded true to eight violations at an Oct. 1 hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Boone Baxter, who recommended the sentence the prosecution and defense had agreed on. Norris waived his right to object to the recommendation and to speak to the district judge before sentencing, according to Baxter’s report.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren Richards represented the government. J. Brandt Thorson represented Norris.

Norris, who was living in Dallas while on supervision, admitted that he stopped submitting monthly reports to his probation officer in September 2021, moved out of a Dallas motel the same month without telling the officer, and was discharged from both a mental health program and a sex offender treatment program in Plano in October 2021 after he stopped showing up. He also admitted he failed to update his sex offender registration after his birthday in June 2022 and did not report his new address to Dallas police after moving, according to the report.

The remaining violations involved contact with children. Norris told a polygraph examiner in 2021 that he had been around his infant daughter and minor stepchildren during an outing to the Galleria Mall in Dallas in September 2020, while he was required to live at a residential reentry center, and that his wife had later let the baby babble to him on the phone and see him through a glass door. His conditions barred unsupervised contact with anyone under 18, the report said.

Norris was arrested Sept. 24, 2025, on the revocation petition and was indicted the following month on a federal charge of failing to register as a sex offender from July 2022 until his arrest. He pleaded guilty to that charge in February. Schroeder sentenced him Sept. 9 to 18 months in prison, with credit for the time he has been held since his arrest, followed by five years of supervised release. The judge recommended that Norris receive mental health and sex offender treatment in prison and be housed at the Texarkana federal prison if he is eligible.

No supervised release will follow the 10-month revocation sentence, which closes out the 1994 case after three revocations. Norris’ supervision was first revoked in 2018 and again in 2019, each time for five months in prison followed by four years of supervision. The current term began in April 2020.

Once he is released, Norris must spend 180 days in a residential reentry center, abstain from alcohol, take part in substance abuse, mental health and sex offender treatment, submit to polygraph testing and have no contact with anyone under 18 unless supervised by an adult approved by his probation officer, according to the judgment.

A jury in Texarkana convicted Norris and Robert Carroll Osborne in June 1994 of kidnapping and using a firearm during a crime of violence. Norris was sentenced to 322 months, nearly 27 years, and Osborne to 295 months. He was released from prison in September 2017.

According to the 1995 Fifth Circuit opinion upholding the convictions, the two men and a third man began a two-day crime spree on March 15, 1994, by robbing a Texarkana man of a .22-caliber revolver, then drove to DeKalb, where Norris talked the girl, who was related to his sister by marriage, into getting in the car. When she asked to go home, Norris showed her the gun, the court said.

The men assaulted her in the car, at an abandoned house and at a Texarkana motel, and Norris told her she was “going to be their girl” and would “make them some money,” according to the opinion. After a burglary in Arkansas, the men drove to Louisiana, where they wrecked the car while speeding away from a housing project. A police officer took the girl into protective custody and arrested Norris and Osborne.