Appeal denied for convicted Highland man

The Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the conviction for a Highland man sentenced to 16 years for fatally shooting another veteran.

Timothy Thomas, now 42, was convicted of aggravated battery and a firearms enhancement for the Jan. 3, 2021, shooting death of Nicholas Lile, 42, in the Lile’s basement near Lowell.

Lile, a U.S. Navy veteran, his wife and her friend had been drinking in the basement for several hours.

The friend invited Thomas over, who she was casually seeing, according to court records.

The mood turned from “friendly to uncomfortable” when Lile told Thomas of an old friend killed in Iraq.

Thomas, an off-duty supervisory police officer with the US Veterans Administration, showed up with a concealed handgun. He claimed Lile attacked and tried to choke him, before he shot him in self-defense.

The jury acquitted

Thomas of the murder charge, but convicted him of aggravated battery.

In the main part of his appeal, Thomas, a U.S. Army veteran, argued if the jury rejected the murder charge, they accepted his self-defense claim. Since it used the same evidence, it would also wash out the aggravated battery.

The appeals court rejected it on a 3-0 ruling, issued March 3.

The jury may not have actually considered a self-appeal defense in their deliberations, Indiana Court of Appeals Judge Leanna Weissmann wrote.

The evidence showed Lile was “so intoxicated that he could not stand and was still on the floor when Thomas drew and pointed his gun.”

Thomas was 13-15 feet near the staircase when he shot Lile “given the placement of Lile’s body and the lack of gunshot residue on Lile’s shirt near the wound,” the appeals judge wrote.

He then ran out the house to call 911, saying he was attacked, but didn’t say Lile was shot for five minutes.

“(The) jury reasonably could have found that Thomas willingly participated in the violence and was at fault by drawing his gun on an unarmed man, rather than climbing the stairs and exiting the home,” she wrote. The jury could find Thomas didn’t intend to kill Lile, but still committed battery.

Weissmann also rejected Thomas’ appeal that his sentence was “too harsh.” A level 3 felony carries a 3-16 year penalty with a 9-year advisory sentence. Thomas’ 11 years for aggravated battery and 5 years on the enhancement, the minimum, was a proper sentence, she wrote.

It noted Thomas only had one prior misdemeanor conviction in Michigan. He also had “several” prior arrests that didn’t lead to convictions, it said.

Thomas served honorably in the military for two decades. Merrillville police once fired him as a patrol officer for “aggressive and negative conduct with the public — acts consistent with the conduct that led to Thomas’s conviction here,” the judge wrote.