Trevor Bare, a 24-year-old White male, was shot on the morning of August 7, 2015, at an apartment house near 43rd and Marcy Streets in Omaha and died shortly afterward at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Police quickly identified a suspect and took 60-year-old James Cotton into custody that day; Cotton was held without bail and charged with first-degree murder. Bare s family said he was a father of three.
Investigators described simmering friction between Bare and Cotton in the days and hours before the shooting. Witness accounts and court records say the men had a negative history, including run-ins between Cotton and Bare s mother and Bare s belief that Cotton had stolen money from him. In the hours before the killing, a truck belonging to a new upstairs tenant was set on fire behind the building, escalating tensions. Around daybreak, an argument at the apartment house culminated in Cotton firing a shotgun at close range, mortally wounding Bare.
A Douglas County jury convicted Cotton of killing Bare in August 2016, and he was later sentenced to life in prison. The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld Cotton s convictions in 2018, rejecting his claims of trial error and ineffective assistance of counsel.
