Verner Thomason, 48, was shot to death at a bus stop along Central Avenue near Grove Street in Albuquerque on October 31, 2014. Police said someone opened fire as he waited there on Halloween, leaving him dead at the scene. News listings and victim registries recorded his name and age and marked the date and city, but offered few details beyond the stark fact that the killing unfolded at that Southeast Albuquerque stop on Central.
For nearly two years the case lingered without an arrest, until detectives followed witness leads that pointed to Timothy Mims. In August 2016, Albuquerque police arrested Mims and publicly described a possible revenge motive: they believed he targeted Thomason because he thought Thomason had sexually abused someone close to him. Reporters noted that court records showed Thomason had prior convictions for offenses involving the sexual abuse of children, a painful history that investigators suggested could have set the motive in motion.
After Mims’ arrest, authorities continued to handle other, unrelated firearms allegations against him in federal court in 2017, but local reports tied him to Thomason’s killing based on the witness accounts that cracked the case. What began as a sudden burst of gunfire at a city bus stop was later framed by police as a feud born of retribution, shifting the story from an anonymous street homicide to a targeted shooting with a named suspect and an alleged motive rooted in the past.
