Caulk gun killer gets 85 years in death of Fort Worth woman

A 41-year-old man who told jurors that he was aiming at a car window when he threw a caulk gun, fatally wounding a 22-year-old friend by accident, was sentenced to 85 years in prison on Thursday.

Jim Harvey Opry pleaded guilty on April 20 to a manslaughter charge for recklessly causing the death of Britney Eylar, who was moving out of his apartment on the night of Jan. 1, 2015. She died on Jan. 9.

Opry’s sentence — the range on the charge is five to 99 years or life in prison — was left in the hands of a jury, which began hearing evidence in the case on Tuesday. Jurors deliberated about 1  1/2 hours before returning the sentence Thursday evening.

Prosecutors David Alex and Allenna Bangs asked that Opry be sentenced to life in prison. They said Opry lacked basic human decency and had proved he could not be rehabilitated despite his time in the juvenile system and later 18  1/2 years in prison, including 10 years for the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party in 1992 near Houston.

“We are past rehabilitation for Jim Opry,” Bangs told jurors. “He is not 17 years old anymore, sitting before you trying to figure out his life. He’s 41 and he’s responsible for the deaths of two people.”

Defense attorneys Mamie Bush Johnson and Stephanie Gonzalez asked that jurors be fair.

“An accident sometimes turn out to be tragic and terrible,” Johnson told jurors. “Prison is where he’s going, but you still have to be fair.”

He must serve 30 years before he is eligible for parole, Bangs said.

2 deadly ‘accidents’

Opry took the stand Thursday morning, describing his childhood, his time in juvenile detention, his past convictions and what he said led to his accidentally causing the deaths of two women more than two decades apart.

He was 17 when he threw a New Year’s Eve party while his parents were away, Opry said. He was drunk when he took out his father’s 12-gauge shotgun and unloaded it. He said he and other teens passed the shotgun around, pointing it at one another and at objects and pulling the trigger.

He wiped away tears as he told jurors how he pointed the gun at Cristie Casanover, 14. and pulled the trigger. The gun unexpectedly fired and hit her in the face.

Opry said he panicked and went along with another teen’s suggestion that they cover up what had happened.

“It wasn’t my idea to dump the body … but I went right along,” Opry testified.

Opry said he later pleaded guilty to manslaughter for recklessly causing Casanover’s death in exchange for deferred adjudication probation and being sent to “boot camp.”

But Opry said that when he returned home from boot camp, he found that his girlfriend had cheated on him with his best friend. He assaulted her, and his probation was revoked. He insisted that he only punched her in the eye and didn’t use a knife and gun as she said, but he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon because he knew that the 10-year sentence prosecutors were offering would run concurrently with his manslaughter sentence.

‘Scared’ and ‘stressed’

Opry told jurors that he met Eylar in mid-October. At first, they were friends but started fighting like “cats and dogs” after she moved in with him temporarily and the relationship became intimate.

On the day she was injured, they had argued but he thought everything was OK after he returned from buying drugs, which they smoked together, he said. He didn’t know that Eylar had called someone to pick her up until she flagged over a car near his apartment in the 400 block of Haltom Road and began putting her belongings inside, he said.

He told jurors he accused Eylar of planning to have sex with the man giving her a ride, and her response indicated that she would. He said he grabbed a caulk gun and spun around to hurl it at the car from where he stood on the second-floor balcony.

“My intention was I was going to bust the window out of the car,” Opry said.

Instead, he said, he watched as the caulk gun sailed over the car’s roof, striking Eylar in the head just as she raised up after moving something inside the car.

He said he rushed down to Eylar.

“I had her in my arms. I was shaking her. I was telling her, ‘Baby, are you OK? Are you OK?’ Her eyes were open. She was looking at me with her eyes open,” he said.

Opry said he refused the repeated urgings from Eylar’s male friend that they needed to call 911, later explaining that he had just gotten out of prison.

“I was scared. I didn’t think she was hurt that bad,” Opry said.

Opry said that it was after the friend left and he moved Eylar to the stairwell and wiped her head with a blanket that the friend had brought him, that he saw the extent of her injury

“I tell her, ‘Baby, its worse than I thought. We have to get an ambulance,’ ” Opry testified.

He said he ran upstairs to get his phone, seeing the reflection of nearby police lights when he returned to her side. He said he stayed with her until he heard the officer knock on a nearby door, prompting him to run.

In the days that followed, Opry testified, he couldn’t sleep without the help of morphine pills and monitored Eylar’s condition through social media and the news.

“I was stressed. I was praying for her,” Opry said.

Parents’ statements

After the sentence was read and the jury was excused, a letter written by Eylar’s father, Anthony Eylar, was read aloud. Her mother, Felicia Land, took the stand and spoke to Opry.

Land said that no sentence could make up for what Opry did but that to know he would never be able to harm another person was a “good start.”

Anthony Eylar said his daughter never got a second chance.

“You had your second chance, and you did it again,” Anthony Eylar wrote. “It is not right for a parent to bury a child. It is definitely not right for a parent to bury their child at the hands of someone who had already taken the life of another family’s child once before.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2016 at 7:31 PM with the headline "Caulk gun killer gets 85 years in death of Fort Worth woman."