Man sentenced for targeting ex after breakup, including drive-by that hurt Wichita girl
A Wichita man was sentenced Tuesday to 14 years in prison for purposely running his ex-girlfriend off the road and shooting up her house after she broke up with him, causing injuries to her young daughter, according to court records and a news release from the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
The woman’s 5-year-old and 9-year-old daughters received minor injuries on Aug. 1, 2022, when Nicholas J. Henry ran them off the road. After he bonded out of jail in that incident, he fired a gun multiple times into the woman’s house on May 7, leaving the younger girl with shrapnel wounds, the DA’s news release says.
Police have said the shooting, which happened around 9 p.m. in the 100 block of south Mt. Carmel, was a drive-by. The woman and both of her daughters were home at the time.
The younger girl, who was 6 at the time of the shooting, “received wounds to her wrist and back from bullet fragments,” the news release said.
Henry’s ex-girlfriend told police she had been in a romantic relationship with him for two years and that he wouldn’t stop calling, emailing and driving by her house after she ended things, according to an affidavit released by the court.
Earlier the day of the shooting, Henry made a threatening phone call and sent texts to her, the affidavit says. After that, he drove to her house to confront her, pushed and threw a beer bottle at her and got into a fistfight with one of her friends, the affidavit says she told police.
Officers who responded to a 911 call about the domestic dispute were still in the area working on the case when they heard several gunshots and saw the woman’s house, front picture windows and car riddled with bullets, the affidavit says.
Henry, 30, pleaded guilty on Sept. 6 to several crimes in the two cases, including aggravated battery, aggravated assault, criminal discharge of a firearm, criminal possession of a weapon by a convicted felon and criminal damage to property, according to the DA’s news release.
On Tuesday, District Judge David Kaufman sent Henry to prison for 32 months for running his former girlfriend’s car off the road and to an additional 136 months for the shooting. Henry must serve the sentences consecutively, or back to back, the news release says.
