Welch sentencing Thursday
<p>No trespassing signs lined the Welch property on a border they shared with their neighbors to the east.</p>
Kristina Lynn Welch, the 53-year-old woman who pleaded guilty in December in the shooting death of her husband, Charles Bryan Welch, is scheduled for sentencing Thursday in 19th Judicial District Court.
Welch will have been jailed for 417 days when she goes before Judge James B. Wheelis at 1:30 p.m. Thursday to hear what her punishment will be.
In awaiting trial, Welch has seen three calendar years in the Lincoln County lockup since being jailed on Dec. 8, 2011, for killing her husband in the early morning at their home at 4410 Granite Lake Road. She admitted to killing her husband and then waiting hours before calling 911 for an ambulance. When emergency responders found Charles Welch, he had been deceased for hours.
Welch, who turns 54 in March, now comes before Wheelis after he rejected a plea agreement in December that sought to limit his ability to set sentencing.
To obtain a guilty plea, Lincoln County Attorney Bernie Cassidy agreed to dismiss deliberate homicide charges against Welch in exchange for a plea bargain that would have given Welch an opprotunity to be released from prison as early as 2015.
Welch attorney Jennifer Streano initially presented the plea-bargain agreement that would have given Welch credit for time served in the Lincoln County Jail. It also would have suspended 17 years of the maximum 20-year sentence for good behavior, meaning she could have served as little as three years for the death of her husband.
Welch has admitted the shooting her husband with a Smith & Wesson revolver in the early morning hours of Dec. 8, 2011, in their Granite Lake Road home. The couple reportedly quarreled about money shortly before the shooting. Charles Welch was a retired prison warden in Florida.
Then-neighbor Justin Green reported during Welch’s bond hearing of an altercation when Welch discharged a Pink Lady .357-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun into the ground near her foot during a property border dispute.
Police questioned Welch after the fatal shooting, further drawing suspicion upon her for delaying in calling for an ambulance.