Thomas Coy avoided a scheduled murder trial by pleading guilty, but the court ordered his two prison terms served back-to-back.
MOUNT VERNON, Mo. — A guilty plea that ended a planned first-degree murder trial has resulted in a 40-year prison sentence for Thomas Coy, the Missouri man who admitted shooting Amazon delivery driver Jasmine Taylor while she was working in Lawrence County in February 2025.
The Nov. 2 sentencing hearing supplied the consequence that had remained unresolved since Coy entered his plea Sept. 14. A judge sentenced him to 30 years for second-degree murder and 10 years for armed criminal action. The court ordered the sentences to run consecutively, producing a total term of four decades. Coy had originally faced a first-degree murder charge and was scheduled for trial Sept. 28 before agreeing to plead guilty to second-degree murder and the accompanying armed criminal action count.
The change from a pending first-degree murder prosecution to a second-degree murder conviction was the central legal development before sentencing, but it did not erase the facts Coy admitted. Taylor, 23, was shot Feb. 5, 2025, while driving an Amazon vehicle along Lawrence County Road 2152, west of Missouri Highway 97 near Wentworth. Authorities said Coy used a pellet rifle. Taylor’s van left the road and crashed into a fence after she was struck. She was taken to Mercy Hospital Joplin and died from her injuries four days later.
Because Coy pleaded guilty, there was no jury trial at which prosecutors were required to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt through live testimony and exhibits. Instead, the plea established his criminal responsibility for second-degree murder and armed criminal action. That procedural turn shortened a case that had been moving toward trial for more than a year. It also left the sentencing judge to determine the punishment within the resolved charges, including whether the prison terms would overlap or be stacked.
The judge chose to stack them. Local court reporting described the 30-year murder sentence and the 10-year armed criminal action sentence as consecutive. That decision is what raised the total from three decades to 40 years. The sentencing therefore became more than a formal conclusion to the September plea; it answered the remaining practical question of how the two convictions would translate into prison time. Reports following the hearing consistently described Coy as headed to the Missouri Department of Corrections to serve the combined sentence.
The prosecution had developed from a much different starting point. On the day Taylor was shot, authorities were called to what first appeared to be a vehicle crash. A witness reported that an Amazon van had gone off County Road 2152 and struck a fence. Taylor was found near the vehicle and taken for emergency treatment. The case changed when hospital officials told law enforcement that doctors had found a projectile in her head, indicating that her loss of control behind the wheel had followed a shooting rather than an unexplained traffic accident.
Investigators then had evidence from the delivery vehicle itself. Video from the Amazon van showed Taylor slumping over in the driver’s seat while the vehicle was near Coy’s driveway, according to sheriff’s investigators and court-related reporting. The camera footage provided a point in the route where something had happened to the driver before the van crossed off the roadway. Detectives used that information, along with the medical findings, as they focused their inquiry on Coy and his residence.
When detectives questioned him, authorities said Coy admitted firing the pellet rifle and seeing the Amazon van crash. He also acknowledged approaching the damaged vehicle afterward, taking Taylor from the driver’s seat and leaving her in a ditch along the road. Investigators said Taylor was alive after the shooting. Those admissions became a major part of the probable cause case and meant police were not relying only on circumstantial evidence from the crash scene or the van’s recording.
Law enforcement later described additional events before the shot was fired. According to investigators, Coy saw the Amazon vehicle traveling down the road, went back to his home to retrieve the weapon and then waited for the van to return. Taylor and Coy did not know each other, authorities said. The account placed a period of time between Coy first seeing the delivery vehicle and firing at Taylor, a detail that was repeatedly cited when prosecutors originally pursued the first-degree murder allegation.
Taylor died Feb. 9 at Mercy Hospital Joplin. Her death changed the prosecution again. Coy had initially been charged in connection with the shooting while she was alive, but the Lawrence County prosecutor’s office later added or upgraded the case to first-degree murder after her death. For much of the case, that was the charge Coy faced. Court proceedings continued through 2025 and into 2026 before the parties reached the guilty-plea resolution shortly before trial.
The plea did not publicly resolve one of the case’s most persistent questions: why Taylor was targeted. Neighbors told news outlets that Coy had complained in the past about delivery vehicles moving too fast along the road. Sheriff officials also indicated during the early investigation that they had information about a motive but were not then releasing it. Neither point establishes that speeding was the reason for Taylor’s killing. No reliable public source reviewed for this article confirms a definitive motive, and the guilty plea did not require a public trial that might have produced additional testimony on that issue.
The absence of a fully disclosed motive does not create the same uncertainty about the basic sequence of events. The investigation was supported by multiple types of evidence: a reported crash, medical findings at the hospital, video inside the delivery van, the location of Coy’s residence and Coy’s statements to detectives. Those sources independently addressed different pieces of the timeline. Together they explained why Taylor’s van left the road and why investigators moved from treating the event as a crash to filing serious felony charges.
Taylor’s obituary says she was born Dec. 18, 2001, in Joplin and died there Feb. 9, 2025, surrounded by family. She was 23. The public case records and news reports identify her as an Amazon delivery driver working when she was shot. While some reports described her as a Joplin resident and others connected her to Rogers, Arkansas, the essential fact is consistent: she was on a delivery route in Lawrence County when the attack occurred and had no known prior relationship with Coy.
The case also illustrates why the label “pellet rifle” did not make the attack minor. Investigators described the weapon as a pellet or air rifle, with some reports specifying a .22-caliber air rifle. Taylor suffered a fatal head wound, and hospital personnel discovered the projectile after she reached medical care. The Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office had previously warned in local reporting that high-powered air rifles can cause severe injuries. In this case, the weapon became the basis for a homicide prosecution after Taylor died.
By accepting the guilty plea, the court avoided a trial that could have lasted days and required witnesses to revisit the shooting in open court. It also meant the public record would not develop in the same way it might have through testimony, cross-examination and the formal introduction of evidence. The known facts instead come largely from the probable cause statement, law enforcement accounts, court reporting and Coy’s admissions. The sentence now supplies the final trial-court outcome even though some questions surrounding motive remain unanswered.
Following the Nov. 2 hearing, Coy was reported to be awaiting transfer from the Lawrence County Jail to the Missouri Department of Corrections. The sheriff’s public roster recorded him as released from the county facility early Nov. 6, after more than a year and a half in that jail. The available roster entry does not state his destination, so a specific state prison assignment could not be independently confirmed from the reviewed sources. His convictions and 40-year sentence, however, are no longer pending matters awaiting trial or sentencing.
Author note: Last updated Nov. 6, 2026.