Watch: Timberview High School shooting suspect’s attempted capital murder trial begins

Pariesa Altman’s English lesson was underway just past 9 a.m. when Zacchaeus 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 on a Wednesday in autumn. Before stepping inside, Selby set his backpack on the floor outside the room at Timberview High School in Arlington.

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 another student, Timothy Simpkins, whose trial on attempted capital murder is underway this week in 371st District Court in Tarrant County.

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’ limbs were drawn close to his torso. His body was in a ball on the floor, his hands covering his face. He never threw a punch, Simpkins’ defense attorneys, Lesa Pamplin and Marquetta Clayton, suggested to jurors.

Though Selby got the best of Simpkins in the fight, the defendant’s response of handgunfire was unjustified, Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Rose Anna Salinas suggested in an opening statement.

Salinas, the office’s criminal division chief, is prosecuting the case with Assistant Criminal District Attorney Lloyd Whelchel.

Two coaches, Dean Boyd and Sarah Herrera, entered the room upon hearing Altman’s yells for help from the door, where the teacher was also trying to stop the entry of students intending to record video of the fray.

Herrera testified that she saw Selby stomp on Simpkins’ head.

After the coaches had separated the fighting students, Herrera testified, Simpkins held a gun pointed at Selby.

“Now what, [expletive]?” Simpkins said, Herrera recalled.

Simpkins fired upon Selby, shooting him once, prosecutors told the jury. Later, outside the room, as Selby crawled on his back toward a stairwell, the defendant shot Selby again, prosecutors said.

A central question for the jury will be whether Simpkins’ assertion that he feared serous bodily injury was reasonable at the time he fired.

Prosecutors have suggested that the fight had ended and any fear Simpkins had was unreasonable.

Selby survived, as did teacher Calvin Pettitt, 25, who also was shot. Another student was grazed by a bullet.

Pettitt testified that he was shot in the back, and the round settled 1 mm from his aorta.

Pettitt entered the room in response to Altman’s call for help to end the fight. When Boyd announced Simpkins had a gun, Pettitt turned and ran. After falling in the doorway, Pettitt stood and made his way to a classroom next door, where a student, violating protocol, opened the locked door and let him inside.

There, Pettitt testified, he felt pain, touched his hand to his back, withdrew it and saw blood.

In an exploratory surgery, a physician concluded the round needed to remain and should not move within his body.

“It’s still in my chest,” Pettitt testified.

He found safety in a room where a teacher emerged from the bottom of a pile of teenagers to grab paper towels to stanch her colleague’s bleeding.

He tried to return to teaching at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year.

“It did not go well,” Pettitt said. He made it to the third week of September before again taking a medical leave. He continues therapy to treat post traumatic stress disorder.

Altman was not able to drive near Timberview High, in the Mansfield Independent School District, for several months.

“I haven’t taught since that day,” she said.

The defense declined to make an opening statement immediately after the state and will likely offer an assessment of the evidence at the beginning of its presentation later in the trial.

The 14-person jury, which includes two alternates, was selected on Friday from a panel of 96 people.

Each was assigned a number, but at the outset of voir dire, as the selection is known, the defense requested a shuffle. The tactic is used, often based on questionnaire responses, to reorder the panel to increase the likelihood that jury candidates favored by the side seeking the shuffle will be selected without using its 10 peremptory challenges.

Judge Ryan Hill sustained a state objection to a defense proposal in which an attorney would ask members of the panel whether they made a distinction between a school shooting and a shooting that happened at a school. The question too closely matched the facts of the Simpkins case, the judge ruled.

The Timberview High case is different in significant ways from killings in Uvalde, Texas; Parkland, Florida; and Newtown, Connecticut, in which an assailant slaughtered dozens of strangers, Pamplin and Clayton argue.

The trial will continue on Tuesday.