In his 939-mile, five-state road odyssey from Valdosta, Georgia, to Fort Worth, Xavier Bass had time to mull his mission, about 14 hours of driving to brood on the bitterness that his father had stirred within the 27-year-old, or perhaps, change his mind about killing him.
Bass in June 2024 saw the patricide plan to it to its end, reducing his father, Gene Bass, to a crumple outside a neighbor’s house in the orderly subdivision where Xavier grew up near North Crowley High School. Xavier’s pistol cast 9-mm cartridge casings into a flower bed and around a trailer parked at the curb as the father tried to evade being shot by his son in midafternoon, in the open in front of four landscapers.
Before Gene fell, Xavier chased his father as if he were a dog, prosecutor Anthony Salinas said on Wednesday in the state’s opening statement in Xavier’s murder trial in a state district court in Tarrant County…