Timberview High School shooter was drug dealer who was robbed, witnesses say at trial

Timothy Simpkins was a marijuana dealer who was pistol whipped and robbed of his product and cash about two weeks before he shot two students and a teacher at his high school in Arlington, prosecutors told a jury on Friday in the punishment phase of his trial.

At a RaceTrac gas station, the older brother of one of the student shooting victims likely robbed Simpkins, prosecutors said. Simpkins fired eight shots at a vehicle at a pump.

Simpkins was on Thursday found guilty of attempted capital murder in connection with the October 2021 shooting at Timberview High School.

The jury will determine Simpkins’ sentence. It was hearing evidence in a second phase of trial that continued until about 6 p.m. Friday. The trial will resume Monday morning. The maximum sentence is life in prison.

Jada Anderson, Simpkins’ girlfriend at the time of the shooting, testified as a state witness.

“He became very popular because of the shooting?” Assistant Criminal District Attorney Rose Anna Salinas asked Anderson.

“Yes,” she testified.

Simpkins shot a teacher running to elude gunfire aimed at a boy who in the preceding seconds pummeled the shooter in a classroom.

Six days before the shooting, Simpkins searched the internet to learn about legal consequences.

“if you at school and someone tries to fight you and you shoot them how much time will you [get],” Simpkins typed on Sept. 30, 2021, at 9:24 a.m., according to a police extraction report on data from Simpkins’ cellphone that prosecutors displayed to the jury.

In its verdict, a jury spurned the defense suggestion that Simpkins did not intend to kill classmate Zaccheaus Selby, who thrashed the defendant inside a room at the school.

Prosecutors ended their punishment case by showing the jury surveillance camera video of Selby lying on a landing at the top of a stairwell just after he was shot. He writhed on the white tile floor on which his blood was smeared.

Simpkins’ defense attorneys had suggested during witness questioning throughout the guilt-innocence trial phase that the beating stirred within Simpkins fear of serious injury or death at Selby’s hands that justified the shooting.

In a ruling that upset that central defense argument, Judge Ryan Hill, who is presiding at the trial in 371st District Court in Tarrant County, concluded that self-defense law did not apply in the Simpkins case and the jury should not be instructed to consider that justification.

Simpkins used a .45-caliber Glock handgun to shoot Selby and teacher Calvin Pettit and graze Shaniya McNeely, another student at the Mansfield district school.

Neither the defendant nor Selby testified at the trial.

In a closing argument, defense attorney Lesa Pamplin recalled that a surveillance video recording showed Simpkins did not fire at Selby when her client stood over him in the hallway. Simpkins had earlier fired six rounds from a handgun.

“If he wanted to kill him, he could have,” Pamplin said.

The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office overcharged the case, Pamplin told the jury.

Lloyd Whelchel, a prosecutor, argued in his closing that Simpkins’ failure to fire more rounds with better accuracy should not mitigate the act.

“Don’t reward him for being a bad shot,” Whelchel said.

He showed the jury a dime. The coin is as thick as the distance that, had the projectile traveled it within Pettit’s body, it could have killed the teacher by piercing an aortic valve, Whelchel said.

The jury deliberated whether Simpkins was guilty or not guilty for about seven hours and 30 minutes. The presiding juror sent to Hill four notes, some of which asked for access to exhibits, including scene photographs and a three-dimensional rendering of the interior of the school.

The precise requests were not clear because only one of the notes was read on the court record.

To find Simpkins guilty of attempted capital murder, the jury was instructed that it must unanimously find either that Simpkins attempted to cause the death of Selby by intentionally shooting Selby with a firearm during the course of committing or attempting to commit the offense of terroristic threat, or that Simpkins attempted to cause the death of more than one person during the same criminal transaction.

Hill permitted the jury to consider aggravated assault with a deadly weapon as a lesser included offense.

Prosecutors objected to a defense request to include self-defense material in the instructions. After Hill made clear his decision to exclude consideration of the central element of the defense argument in the case, defense attorney Marquetta Clayton told the judge the ruling would cause “egregious harm” to her client.

Pariesa Altman’s English lesson was underway just past 9 a.m. when Selby knocked at her second-floor classroom door.

Altman opened the entrance, which had been locked under school district policy, and ushered in the 15-year-old, who was late to class.

Selby did not take his assigned seat near the door. Without speaking, the teenager charged to the back of the room.

“He went straight toward Timothy,” Altman testified Monday referring to Simpkins.

The boys fought, and throughout Selby held control over Simpkins, who was 18 on Oct. 6, 2021, when the encounter occurred.

Simpkins took a beating, according to the testimony of four eyewitnesses. Simpkins’ body was in a ball on the floor, his hands covering his face. He did not throw a punch.