UPDATE: Arrest in Shooting Of Judge Julie Kocurek

UPDATE: Austin police say there has been an arrest of a “person of interest” in the shooting of Judge Julie Kocurek.

“The Austin Police Department is aware of the arrest in Houston of a person of interest in the shooting of the Honorable Judge Julie Kocurek,” the department said in a news release. “The arrest was for unrelated charges and we will not make any further comments at this time due to our ongoing investigation.”

This story will be updated. Refresh the page for more news as it becomes available.

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State District Judge Julie Kocurek, shot outside her home Friday night and hospitalized with “serious” injuries, is no stranger to violence. As presiding judge of Travis County’s felony court, she’s handled cases involving cold-blooded murderers, unrepentant rapists and heartless degenerates who would do harm to children.

Boiled down: Judge Kocurek has handled a lot of violent people.

That may be part of the reason that law enforcement sources are describing Friday’s shooting as an “assassination attempt,” a chilling phrase that has even hard-core veterans working in criminal justice a bit on edge.

“I think most people woke up, heard this had happened and thought, no way did this happen, not here,” Mindy Montford, a defense attorney who worked with Kocurek when both were prosecutors, told Patch.

“When the reality set in,” she said, “we’re thinking it’s got to be somebody she’s sentenced or is about to sentence... It does appear to all involved that it was a targeted hit.”

The judge was shot Friday in her driveway in West Austin just after 10 p.m. She was returning from a high school football game with, among others, a teenage son, Montford said.

Robbery has been ruled out as a motive, as nothing was stolen from the judge or those who were with her when the gunman struck. And a garbage can placed on her driveway, which forced the driver of the car to move it while pulling in Friday, makes it appear the shooting was planned.

“Her injuries were the result of a firearm being deployed in an attempt to murder her,” the lead investigator in the case, Cmdr. Mark Spangler, told the Austin American-Statesman.

That has led the court’s staff and police to comb through hundreds of Travis County felony cases in search of anyone who might want to harm her.

The truth is, though, that’s a lot of people.

Kocurek had been the victim of several threats in the past couple of years, the Statesman reported, and the sheer number of people who have appeared in her courtroom makes locating the shooter solely on background checks a difficult task.

Kocurek, a former prosecutor, has served as the presiding judge of the 390th District Court since being appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush in January 1999.

From 2011 to 2014, Kocurek served as the administrative presiding judge of all criminal courts in the county. In that time, she helped spur an overhaul of the defense system used to appoint lawyers to the cases of poor defendants.

Among the cases she has overseen:

• Celeste Beard Johnson, convicted in 2003 of orchestrating the shotgun death of her husband, Steven Beard Jr.
• Mark Norwood, who was convicted on the 1986 killing of Christina Mornton and is now facing charges in the 1988 death of Debra Baker;
• Dara Llorens, who was arrested in Mexico for the 2002 kidnapping of her daughter, Sabrina Allen;
• Texas Governor Rick Perry and former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Still, lawyers and judges say Kocurek was known as a compassionate judge who has worked hard over the years to improve legal representation for the poor and who earned a reputation for fairness.

“Some judges have a reputation for being pro-prosecutor or pro-defense,” said Montford, the defense attorney. “Everybody I know thought she was completely fair.”

“She is a very strong judge,” prosecutor Gary Cobb, the only declared candidate in next year’s race for Travis County district attorney, told the Dallas Morning News. “She is very knowledgeable about the law and, more importantly, is very fair in her treatment of everyone who comes in front of her.”

“If this was going to happen to anybody, it wouldn’t happen to her,” retired Judge Bob Perkins told the paper. “This is totally illogical.”