Xavier Bass in a state district court in Tarrant County pleaded guilty to murder in the shooting of his father, Gene Bass, in Fort Worth.
Amanda McCoy
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
The locations of the small holes in Gene Bass’ body were plotted on a diagram that a prosecutor displayed on a screen in a Fort Worth courtroom this week, the entrance and exit gunshot wounds dotted like chickenpox blisters on the outline of a human form.
During an autopsy, a pathologist threaded flexible rods through some of the holes in order to track the bullets’ trajectory.
Justice Lee Gabriel allowed the probe images over a defense objection that the photos would inflame the passions of jurors who were supposed to be level-headed assessors of the evidence.
There were five entrance wounds in Gene Bass’ arms, one in his knee, two each in his abdomen and back. Two in his head.
The wounds on Gene’s left arm were not far from a tattoo of the name of his son, Xavier, who was also his killer.
Xavier Bass drove from Georgia to kill his father in Fort Worth. When the ammunition in one magazine was gone outside Gene’s house near North Crowley High School, Xavier reloaded a pistol with a second magazine, firing about 25 rounds in total.
Gene Bass, who deployed to Iraq during his time in the Army, died in front of his neighbor’s house in the 4400 block of Chesapeake Bay Drive. The upper half of his body stretched across a sidewalk and its lower half was in grass. Gene was 54 and worked as a JROTC teacher in the Crowley school district.
Xavier planned the killing, in June 2024, for weeks, perhaps months, he told Antoinette McGarrahan, a psychologist whom the district attorney’s office hired to conduct an evaluation.
Defense attorneys Abe Factor and Lisa Hoobler told the jury that Xavier’s early years, during which Gene was consumed with his life in the Army, were spent in the custody of his mentally ill mother. Until he was 8 and CPS removed him from her care, Xavier and his mother were often homeless. His youth was stained by dysfunction and neglect, adverse childhood experiences that increase the risk of mental illness. Neither McGarrahan nor a psychologist hired by the defense concluded Xavier’s symptoms meet the threshold for any mental illness diagnosis.
Xavier’s anger with his father flared further when Gene was, in Xavier’s view, insufficiently supportive of attempts to reunite with his mother and help her.
Like his father, Xavier also enlisted in the Army. Once he left, Xavier was exasperated with what he assessed was his father’s mishandling of Xavier’s effort to live with his troubled mother, the defense argued.
“Gene didn’t deserve to die for what he did, but what he did got him killed,” Hoobler told the jury in the defense opening statement.
The killing was not foreseen by Xavier’s relatives and its motivation was nebulous, lead prosecutor Ashlea Deener suggested in the state’s closing argument.
“The scariest thing is there is no reason why,” Deener said.
Sometimes, she said, evil is the explanation.
A jury on Thursday assessed Xavier’s punishment at life in prison, the term the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office sought. Xavier, who is 29, will become eligible for parole after he serves 30 years. The panel, in the 372nd District Court, was directed to select a term of between five and 99 years, or life. Hoobler argued that her client merited a minium term.
Xavier’s guilt was not in dispute at the trial. Just before prosecutors Deener and Anthony Salinas began their case in chief on Tuesday, Xavier pleaded guilty to murder.
The plea was an acknowledgement of the strength of the evidence, Salinas said in his closing argument.
“There was no other choice,” the prosecutor said.
Xavier decided not to testify.
In his drive from Valdosta, Georgia, to Fort Worth, Xavier had time to mull his mission, hours alone in a pickup truck to brood on the bitterness that his father had stirred, or, perhaps, change his mind about killing him.
Xavier chased his father around a trailer parked at the curb as Gene tried to evade being shot by his son in midafternoon, in the open in front of four landscapers.
Xavier drove away from the scene after the shooting and returned to Georgia, where he was arrested at his apartment.
Hoobler and Factor requested that Justice Gabriel include in the jury’s instructions an advisory on sudden passion. The judge denied the request, finding there had been no evidence to support the instruction.
If the jury had been permitted to consider whether Xavier was under the immediate influence of sudden passion and found that he had been, the panel would have selected a prison term of between two and 20 years.
This story was originally published August 7, 2026 at 10:11 AM.
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Emerson Clarridge covers crime and other breaking news for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He works days and reports on law enforcement affairs in Tarrant County. He previously was a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and the Observer-Dispatch in Utica, New York.