A man convicted of shooting his girlfriend in the face with a shotgun was sentenced to nearly 50 years in prison.
Judge Christina Habas ordered that Thomas McBride, 50, serve 48 years for attempted first-degree murder and 32 years for first-degree assault. The sentences will run concurrently.
The sentence came after emotional testimony by the victim, Martha Clark, and McBride’s family. “He will never understand the pain he caused me when he put the shotgun to my face and shot me,” Clark said. “The doctors didn’t think I would make it; he didn’t want me to make it.”
Although she survived the blast, she has undergone extensive reconstructive surgery. The damage caused by the gun required surgeons to reconstruct her face with six metal plates, bone from the top of her skull and skin from her thigh.
Habas described what happened to Clark as “unspeakable cruelty.
“You were a really beautiful woman,” the judge said. Habas rejected McBride’s claim that the shotgun blast was “accidental.”
“This was no accident,” she said.
McBride’s two children, Thomas McBride III and Elizabeth McBride, told the judge that their father has always been a wonderful man.
“My dad … is my best friend,” McBride’s son said. “He is the most loving, caring, supportive person in the world.”
Elizabeth, who is deaf, signed that her father is a caring person.
But Zenobia Shaw, Clark’s daughter, said that what happened to her mother has traumatized her and her children.
“They couldn’t believe that someone would hurt their grandmother like this,” she said.
“For somebody to shoot her in the face was so crazy.”
McBride made a brief statement, but he spoke so softly most in the packed courtroom couldn’t hear him.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
