A judge sentenced a Veteran’s Affairs police officer to 16 years Friday for a Lowell man’s fatal shooting last year.
Timothy R. Thomas, 41, of Highland, looked down as the sentence was given.
A jury convicted him Nov. 24 of aggravated battery with a firearm enhancement in the Jan. 3, 2021, shooting death of Nicholas Lile, 42.
Judge Salvador Vasquez said Thomas, who was off-duty at the time, didn’t meet his responsibility as a law enforcement officer by shooting Lile, then leaving his house without helping him.
“That’s a failure,” he said.
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A woman Thomas had been briefly dating, Angela Gauler, invited him Jan. 2 to her friend Jessika Lile’s home in Lowell where she and the Liles had been drinking in the basement for several hours.
Thomas and his lawyers contended the shooting was self-defense. He was afraid for his life, since Nicholas Lile grabbed Thomas by the neck, choked him and took him to the ground punching him, then threatened to kill him. Thomas pulled out a gun, identified himself as a police officer and fired a single shot, according to court records.
By contrast, prosecutors said Thomas overreacted and his injuries from that night did not justify what happened.
Thomas, an Army veteran, worked as a police officer for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, while Lile was a railroad engineer, a veteran Navy Corpsman once embedded with U.S. Marine units in deployments and humanitarian assignments around the globe.
Several members of Thomas’ family and an Army buddy spoke highly of him.
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Patricia Thomas, his mother, said her son “had to choose to live or die,” while acknowledging the Lile family’s grief.
“I, too, have lost a child,” she said.
Debbie Ulerick, Lile’s mother, said she was robbed of several “firsts” after her son was killed. His daughter now 8, would have to grow up without him.
Jessika, Lile’s widow, recently gave her a “beautiful necklace” with his birthstone, birth and death date containing a small amount of his ashes.
“This is all I have left of my son,” she said.
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Their family had been shattered by grief, and she didn’t know how she would live with it for the rest of her life, Ulerick said.
“You have your son,” she told Thomas’ family.
Thomas “ripped (the child’s) life away from her” when he killed her father, Jessika Lile said.
She was alarmed that her daughter’s letter to the judge was “mean, vengeful, hateful,” telling how she was “sad” and “depressed.”
“You changed the entire trajectory of our lives that night,” Lile said.
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She and her daughter suffered lingering psychological damage from living in the same house where Lile died.
“This is PTSD,” she said.
“I have not found a way to forgive you and I don’t think I ever will,” Lile added, urging Vasquez to impose a “maximum” sentence.
Prosecutors said Thomas was fired as a Merrillville police officer in August 2006 after seven months due to overly aggressive approaches toward street work. Vasquez later said he would give no bearing to what happened 15 years ago.
Thomas’ lawyers noted he had an 80% disability rating — diagnosed in 2013 with a traumatic brain injury, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service. The judge later noted it was impossible to determine what role, if any, PTSD could have played.
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The shooting was a “terrible tragedy,” defense lawyer Benjamin Murphy said. Thomas “did not want to do what he had to do.”
Thomas should be held “accountable,” Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Michelle Jatkiewicz said. The sentencing was not to decide who had a “better family,” she said. Both had people that loved them.
A jury already rejected the self-defense argument, she said. In his 911 call outside, Thomas first said he was a police officer, then waited a handful of minutes before he said Lile was shot, Jatkiewicz said.
Thomas “wasn’t the police that night, arguably, he wasn’t the police at all,” she said.
No one truly knew exactly what happened that night that led to the shooting, Vasquez said. The use of deadly force was “not reasonable,” he said.
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The case was “much more tragic” and “unique”; it gave him “a lot of pause” because it involved two honorably discharged war veterans whose lives were “destroyed, shattered” by what happened.
“I don’t know what happened that day,” he said. “I do know someone died.”
Law enforcement officers are held to a higher standard. Thomas “failed in that responsibility,” Vasquez said.
The judge declined Murphy’s request for protective custody, but said he was put in Thomas’ file for Department of Corrections staff that he was a police officer.
Due to COVID-19 protocols, the high-profile hearing was broadcast online.
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