A Citronelle man convicted of stabbing another man outside a lounge has been sentenced to 15 years and a day in prison, a judge ruled following his conviction on a felony assault charge. The sentence closes one chapter in a string of violent cases prosecutors have tied to the same defendant, who still faces two pending attempted murder charges tied to separate shootings from 2022.
A jury convicted Joshua Skipper of first-degree assault in April after hearing evidence that he cut another man’s hand with a large knife during an altercation outside a lounge in November 2024, according to prosecutors. The conviction followed a trial in Mobile County, where prosecutors presented the case against him for the attack outside the lounge.
First-degree assault is among the most serious non-capital felony charges in Alabama, carrying a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison for a standard conviction. The statute covers assaults committed with a deadly weapon or with intent to cause serious physical injury, and the use of a large knife in the lounge attack fit squarely within that framework, according to the evidence presented at trial.
The sentence of 15 years and a day reflects a common practice in Alabama courts, where judges sometimes add a day beyond a round number to ensure the sentence is served in state prison custody rather than under a shorter jurisdictional threshold. Prosecutors described the outcome as appropriate given both the nature of the assault and the defendant’s pending charges.
Skipper still faces two pending attempted murder charges tied to separate shootings from 2022. Prosecutors allege he shot Justin Trevino in the chest in November 2022, leaving Trevino with life-threatening injuries. In a separate case, prosecutors say Skipper shot Tina Stagner during an incident in October 2022. Those cases remain active in Mobile County circuit court.
The 2022 arrest after a manhunt
Skipper was arrested on December 1, 2022, after the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office located him following a manhunt during which he was described as “armed and extremely dangerous.” The search for him spanned days and drew attention across northern Mobile County, where deputies worked leads while warning residents to avoid contact with him and report sightings immediately.
He was booked into Metro Jail and charged with two counts of attempted murder, certain persons forbidden from possessing a firearm, and shooting into an occupied building or vehicle. The firearm charges reflected prosecutors’ allegations that Skipper, as a previously convicted person, was legally barred from possessing a weapon at the time of the shootings.
Metro Jail, the downtown Mobile facility operated jointly by Mobile County and the City of Mobile, serves as the primary intake detention center for arrests made by the sheriff’s office, Mobile police, and municipal departments across the county. Inmates facing felony charges in Mobile County circuit court typically remain there through the early stages of prosecution.
Shooting into an occupied building or vehicle is itself a Class B felony under Alabama law, punishable by up to 20 years, and it is frequently charged in cases where gunfire endangers people even when no one is struck. Combined with the attempted murder counts, the charges prosecutors filed after the December 2022 arrest exposed Skipper to decades in prison if convicted on all counts.
Deputies at the time of the manhunt credited tips from the public with helping locate suspects in rural northern Mobile County, where the county line runs more than 40 miles north of downtown Mobile and deputies patrol wide stretches of forest, farmland, and small towns with limited municipal police coverage.
Citronelle Police said they were called to a home on North Fifth Street on October 18, 2022, where Skipper’s ex-girlfriend reported that he had shot at her. The report set off the first of the incidents that would ultimately lead to the attempted murder charges, and it prompted an immediate response from the Citronelle department, which polices the city of roughly 4,000 residents near the Mississippi line.
Citronelle sits in the far northern corner of Mobile County, about 45 miles from downtown Mobile, along the Mobile River’s upper reaches. The town’s police department is small, and serious felony investigations there routinely draw support from the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office and the district attorney’s office, both of which became involved in the cases against Skipper.
On November 27, 2022, Skipper was accused of shooting a man off Woodland Drive in Citronelle, leaving the victim in critical condition. The Thanksgiving-weekend shooting intensified the search for him, and within days deputies had named him as the target of a manhunt that ended with his arrest on December 1.
Prosecutors allege the Trevino shooting was the November 27 incident, in which the victim suffered life-threatening injuries after being shot in the chest. The Stagner case, from the October 18 report on North Fifth Street, grew out of the ex-girlfriend’s account of being shot at. Both alleged victims survived the initial incidents, and both cases have moved through the court system alongside the assault case that has now concluded.
How the cases have moved through court
Both attempted murder cases are scheduled for a status hearing in October, according to court records. Status hearings allow judges to review discovery, scheduling, and plea negotiations, and they often signal how close a case is to trial. The October hearings will determine the timeline for resolving the two remaining felony cases against Skipper.
The sequencing matters for sentencing purposes as well. Under Alabama law, convictions in separate cases can be run consecutively, and a defendant already serving a 15-year sentence faces a materially different negotiation posture than one awaiting his first conviction. Prosecutors typically weigh that dynamic when deciding whether to proceed to trial or resolve pending charges through plea agreements.
The 15-year sentence for the lounge stabbing was handed down after the April jury verdict, and it came more than a year after the November 2024 attack. In the interim, Skipper remained in custody while the case moved through the docket, a common outcome for defendants facing violent felony charges where bond is set high or revoked.
For the communities in northern Mobile County, the case has been a visible one. The October 2022 report on North Fifth Street, the Woodland Drive shooting a little more than a month later, and the subsequent manhunt all unfolded within a span of roughly six weeks in a town where serious violent crime is uncommon and incidents draw close community attention.
The lounge attack in November 2024 occurred well after Skipper’s release on the earlier charges, a fact prosecutors have pointed to in describing the pattern of allegations against him. The pending attempted murder cases will determine how much of the alleged 2022 violence is ultimately proven in court, and the October status hearings will be the next public step in that process.
The outcome in the assault case also illustrates how felony prosecutions unfold in Mobile County, where the district attorney’s office separates cases into trial divisions and violent felony dockets often take a year or more to reach a jury. Victims and witnesses in the pending attempted murder cases can expect a similar timeline, with the October status hearings setting the pace for what may be multiple trials or negotiated resolutions.
Alabama’s sentencing structure gives circuit judges broad discretion within statutory ranges, and judges consider factors including the seriousness of the injury, the use of a weapon, and the defendant’s record when setting a term of years. The 15-year-and-a-day sentence imposed here sits near the upper-middle of the range for first-degree assault, reflecting the severity of the knife attack described at trial.
Under Alabama’s truth-in-sentencing framework, defendants convicted of violent felonies generally serve a substantial majority of their sentence in prison custody, with credit for time served reducing the effective term. A 15-year sentence for a violent offense therefore translates into many years of actual incarceration, a point prosecutors emphasized when describing the consequence of the jury’s verdict.
Skipper’s path through the system has also involved multiple law enforcement agencies working in parallel. Citronelle police handled the initial October 2022 response on North Fifth Street, the sheriff’s office led the November manhunt and the arrests that followed, and Metro Jail staff processed the bookings — a division of labor typical of Mobile County, where municipal departments, the sheriff, and state troopers all operate across a large and varied jurisdiction.
The pending weapon-related charges remain part of the case load as well. The count of certain persons forbidden from possessing a firearm and the shooting-into-an-occupied-vehicle count each carry their own potential sentences, and how prosecutors resolve those counts alongside the attempted murder charges will shape the final arithmetic of Skipper’s total punishment.
For now, the case returns to the courtroom in October, when the status hearings on the two attempted murder charges will outline what comes next. Until then, the sentence in the lounge stabbing stands as the resolution of the most recent of the three violent incidents prosecutors have tied to Skipper across three separate cases in Mobile County.