The court heard sharply different accounts of the victim as it weighed punishment for a fatal 2022 shooting near Vicksburg.

VICKSBURG, Miss. — A Warren County man was sentenced to 40 years in state custody, with 10 years to serve in prison, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the shooting death of his father nearly four years ago.

Jeffrey Young Jr., 27, entered the plea in the death of Jeffrey Young Sr., 57, and was sentenced by 9th District Circuit Court Judge Toni Terrett. The punishment brought a court resolution to a case that began with a July 2022 argument at the family’s home on Castle Road in the Camelot subdivision, south of Vicksburg. Prosecutors said Young Jr. left the dispute, retrieved a gun from his room and shot his father in the front yard while the older man had his back turned and posed no immediate threat. The defense presented evidence of years of alcohol-fueled conflict and alleged abuse inside the family.

The sentence means Young Jr. will spend a decade in prison under the terms announced in court. The remaining portion of the 40-year sentence will not require him to remain incarcerated if he satisfies the conditions imposed by the court. The local courtroom report said Mississippi law requires people serving a sentence for second-degree murder to serve the prison term day for day, making Young ineligible for an early release from the 10-year period he was ordered to serve.

The fatal encounter happened on July 5, 2022, at the Castle Road residence. Warren County sheriff’s deputies were called to the home at about 7 p.m. and found Young Sr. shot to death in the front yard. Sheriff Martin Pace described the confrontation at the time as a “brief argument” between the father and son. Later reporting identified car speakers as the subject of the dispute. The argument itself was short, according to authorities, but testimony at sentencing placed it against a much longer history of turmoil in the household.

Investigators arrested Young Jr., then 23, after the shooting. At an early court hearing, Lt. Stacy Rollison, the Warren County Sheriff’s Office chief of investigations, testified that Young Jr. admitted shooting his father. Investigator Erich Jershied testified that a gun of the same caliber as the weapon used in the shooting was found in Young Jr.’s room. A judge initially set Young Jr.’s bond at $1 million while the murder case moved forward.

The early investigation also led to a charge against Young Jr.’s mother, Tracie Young, who was the victim’s wife. Authorities accused her of lying to investigators about her son’s involvement and charged her with being an accessory after the fact. Her bond was set at $500,000 during the 2022 proceedings. The sources reviewed for this report did not provide the current status or final outcome of the case against her, and the charge against her was separate from her son’s guilty plea and sentence.

At the recent sentencing hearing, Young Jr. told the judge that his father struggled with alcohol and regularly became violent. “He would go in a rage and get violent every day,” Young Jr. said. He apologized and acknowledged that Young Sr. was his father, then told the court that “that day he just pushed me too far.” His statement described the shooting as the breaking point in a troubled relationship, but the prosecution argued that the manner in which he armed himself and approached his father showed that the killing could not be excused as an immediate act of self-protection.

Defense attorney Mike Bonner told the court that law enforcement officers had been called to the family residence multiple times because of incidents involving Young Sr. Other witnesses offered accounts intended to show that the violent conflict did not begin on the night of the shooting. A cousin testified about an incident at a Kroger store in which Young Sr., while intoxicated, allegedly slammed his son into a wall and began punching him. Young Jr.’s third-grade teacher said the father often appeared intoxicated at events involving his son.

A family friend gave an even broader account, describing Young Sr. as frequently intoxicated, involved with drugs and abusive toward his wife and son. Those statements were presented in court as testimony about the family’s history. They were not findings that changed Young Jr.’s responsibility for the shooting. The defense used the testimony to ask the judge to view the crime in the context of years of fear, instability and alleged mistreatment rather than as a fatal argument that arose without warning.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Warren focused the court on Young Jr.’s actions immediately before the shooting. Warren said the older man was turned away from his son and did not pose a threat when the fatal shot was fired. The prosecutor also said Young Jr. went to his room to obtain the gun before confronting his father outside. That sequence, the state argued, showed there was time and distance between the argument and the shooting. Warren asked Terrett to impose the maximum sentence of 40 years.

The dispute over punishment required the court to consider two sets of facts that were not mutually exclusive: witnesses described a deeply troubled family history, while prosecutors described a killing in which the victim was unarmed, turned away and not threatening the defendant at the moment he was shot. Evidence that Young Sr. had behaved violently in the past did not establish that Young Jr. faced an immediate danger when he fired. The guilty plea also meant Young Jr. accepted criminal responsibility for second-degree murder instead of asking a jury to decide whether the shooting was legally justified.

Young Sr.’s sister, identified in local reporting as Jackie, asked the judge to impose the maximum punishment. She offered a view of her brother that contrasted with the testimony presented by the defense. “My brother was a loving and caring person,” she said. She also told the court that she continued to love her nephew but wanted him to receive the maximum sentence for killing her brother. Her statement illustrated the divided loyalties left within a family that lost one member to homicide and saw another sent to prison.

A pastor and family friend, Kojo Davis, expressed similar pain shortly after the killing in 2022. Davis said he felt for the entire family and described Young Sr. as a good, hardworking man. He said it was especially heartbreaking that the death involved the victim’s son. Those comments came before the later sentencing testimony about alleged abuse, but they showed that people who knew the family were grieving for both sides from the earliest days of the case.

The plea reduced the legal uncertainty surrounding the shooting. Young Jr. had originally faced a murder charge after his arrest. By pleading guilty to second-degree murder, he avoided a trial at which prosecutors and defense lawyers would have presented competing accounts of his intent, his father’s conduct and the circumstances in the yard. The plea established the conviction, leaving Terrett to decide the sentence after hearing from the defendant, attorneys, relatives and other witnesses.

The case also changed significantly with the passage of time. Young Jr. was 23 when deputies arrested him in July 2022 and was 27 when he appeared for sentencing. The nearly four-year interval separated the initial allegations from the final judgment. During that period, the central facts remained consistent in public reporting: a father and son argued, Young Jr. obtained a gun, and Young Sr. was shot in the front yard. The sentencing hearing supplied a fuller account of the family conflict that preceded the killing but had not been detailed in the first reports.

Terrett’s decision did not adopt the maximum period of incarceration requested by the state, although the formal sentence was set at 40 years. By ordering 10 years to be served, the judge imposed a substantial prison term while stopping short of requiring Young Jr. to spend the full 40 years behind bars. The public reports did not provide a detailed explanation from the judge about how she weighed the prosecution’s description of the shooting against the defense evidence concerning the family’s history.

For now, Young Jr. is to serve the prison portion of his sentence in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. No trial will be held following his guilty plea. The available reports did not identify any additional hearing scheduled in his case or say whether he planned to challenge the sentence.

Author note: Last updated July 13, 2026.