A 21-year-old troublemaker from Texas has been sentenced to 40 years in the prison for fatally shooting his 17-year-old friend 11 times in the back during a sleepover.
The judge, Josh Hill, on Friday, didn’t throw the book at James Michael Sotelo hard enough for the murder of Corey Thompson, when he told him he would be spending a long time in a state correctional facility, Friday.
Half a year back, a jury in Harris County found Sotelo guilty on one murder charge after a trial that spanned six days.
March 20, 2021
As per the DA’s press release, on March 20, 2021, Thompson was sleeping over at the Sotelo family home. The then 18-year-old Sotelo, a high school dropout, grabbed a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun and fired off at Thompson “at least 13 times while his friend was apparently trying to go to bed about 3 a.m.”
During the investigation, it was revealed that Sotelo shot Thompson 11 times in the back. The release mentioned that one of the bullets missed Thompson but pierced through Sotelo’s bedroom wall, hitting his own brother in the face while he was sleeping.
Fortunately, Sotelo’s brother survived the incident.
Sotelo was handed an extra two years for the deadly conduct charge for shooting his brother, to be served concurrently with the 40-year sentence. Prosecutors stated that Sotelo claimed he was not drunk or under the influence of any substances at the time of the incident.
“We asked the judge for a sentence of at least 50 years because this defendant doesn’t care about what he did, he did not have any remorse for the victim and there weren’t any mitigating factors,” she said.
In court, Sotelo took the stand and argued that he killed Thompson because the teenager had allegedly assaulted him while he was asleep.
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