Timothy Thomas gets two additional life sentences after pleading to 2010 homicide of 16-year-old Sebastian Ochsenius

Staff report

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Timothy Eugene Thomas, 35, has been sentenced to two life sentences after pleading nolo contendere to the 2010 murder of 16-year-old Sebastian Ochsenius, adding to his previous three life sentences.

On June 29, 2010, an intruder entered the Ochsenius home through a sliding glass door at about 3:45 a.m. and shot Sebastian, who had been playing video games with a friend in his family’s home in the neighborhood across NW 43rd Street from the Millhopper Branch Library. Sebastian’s friend said Sebastian had gotten up to walk to the kitchen, then gunshots rang out, and he and Sebastian’s father rushed to Sebastian, who died a short time later; they told responding officers that they didn’t see the shooter.

Although documents in the case are still sealed, new evidence reportedly surfaced in 2020, and on December 14, 2023, the Alachua County Winter Term Grand Jury indicted Thomas on charges of homicide while engaged in trafficking and armed burglary; today, Thomas entered a plea of nolo contendere to both charges, and Judge Robert Groeb sentenced him to two terms of natural life.

A letter from Thomas’s mother to Judge Groeb claims that Thomas was with Jaxon Coleman and an unidentified woman on the night of Ochsenius’s murder and that they drove to Gainesville to rob a house for drugs, “specifically marijuana,” and then drove to Tallahassee. Thomas’s mother claims that Coleman’s DNA was found on a shirt that was left at the scene and that Coleman identified Thomas as the murderer in exchange for full immunity; she said she has never “spoken out or been involved” in Thomas’s previous cases because she reviewed the evidence and agreed that he “put himself in those situations,” but she believes that in this case, the evidence points more strongly to Coleman than to Thomas.

Thomas’s criminal history includes an arrest in Orange County for armed robbery in 2011 that led to four years in state prison. He was released in April 2015, and in October 2015, he was pulled over in Key West by a Monroe County Sheriff’s Deputy for a traffic violation and shot the deputy, who survived only because he was wearing a vest. Thomas was sentenced to life in prison on that charge and other associated charges and has been incarcerated since June 2018. In October 2025, he was sentenced to a third life sentence for a homicide charge out of Miami-Dade County.