After shooting his partner eight times in March 2022, Robert Lee Harrison Jr., 52, was sentenced to serve 55 years in federal prison Monday on ammunition, attempted kidnapping and attempted car jacking charges.
Tara Currin, who survived Harrison’s attack, said she felt relieved to hear Harrison did not receive a more lenient sentence, even after a prior conviction for kidnapping was thrown out in favor of a new trial for attempted kidnapping.
“I feel a lot better about it,” Currin said after Monday’s sentencing. “I feel confident, even if he appeals. I don’t really think that he’ll win this time, but I’m just grateful that the judge could see through everything, because he can be quite convincing.”
Currin perviously testified that Harrison waited in a parking garage at the hospital where Currin worked before he shot her March 11, 2022 — the day after she was granted a protective order against him. Harrison coerced Currin into her car at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her before Currin managed to escape. Harrison caught her near the elevators, where he pointed his gun at her. Currin testified that she grabbed the muzzle of the gun and was attempting to point it away from her when Harrison shot her eight times.
In her victim’s impact statement read Monday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, Currin said she recalls the details of the shooting vividly — the sight of her blood splattered on the wall, the sound of her own labored breathing as she crawled back toward the INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center for help. After medics began treating her, she remembers the disorientation of hearing them slowly count to eight as they cut off her blood-soaked clothing. At the time, she had not yet realized she had been shot six times in the abdomen and twice in the thigh.
Currin’s femoral artery had been severed, and her lung collapsed. She underwent seven hours of emergency surgery.
“Those eight bullets have shattered me emotionally, physically and psychologically,” she said Monday in her statement to District Judge Bernard M. Jones II.
Currin credited her will for survival to her mother, saying she did not want her to have to bury her child. As Currin delivered her statement, her mother watched from the court’s gallery, crying quietly as her daughter recounted the trauma she had endured.
“I always tell people that she was the reason that [I sought help] when I saw that first splatter of blood. I would say I felt the heat from that first bullet, and that’s when I saw the blood splatter, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, he shot me,’ because I never heard the shot,” Currin said after the sentencing. “And so I immediately was like, you know, I’ve got to get help.”
While Currin was being treated, she asked for a nurse to call her mother.
“I kept telling her to call her, and I never felt like I was going to die, but I wanted them to tell her that I was going to be OK, that I knew she was going to hear that I’ve been shot eight times, and that I was — if someone says, ‘Your daughter has been shot eight times, one of those shots has hit her femoral artery, she she had to get 11 units of blood,’ of course, you’re going to panic as a mother,” Currin said. “I was like, I need her to know that I’m going to be OK.”
Currin, an only child, is also her mother’s caretaker, and she emphasized both dynamics during her statement to the court and in her comments after the sentencing. She said Harrison knew full well how much her mother relied on her.
“My dad passed away probably about 20 years ago, and so I was just like, ‘I have to survive for her,’ and [Harrison] knew that better than anyone, what I am to her,” she said.
Robert Lee Harrison had intensive criminal history
Harrison’s sentencing technically has nothing to do with Harrison shooting Currin, but instead the events that led up to it. Harrison was initially charged in 2022 by the state district attorney with two counts of domestic assault and battery, (one count with a deadly weapon and one without), possessing a firearm as a felon and attempted kidnapping. In December 2023, the state requested those charges be dismissed two months after Harrison was initially sentenced to life in prison for his federal charges.
Harrison appealed the federal decision, however, and two of his convicted counts — kidnapping and use of a firearm during a crime of violence — were vacated. That led his case to Jones’ courtroom for a new trial.
“The kidnapping, they said it wasn’t completed because I got away,” Currin explained.
Instead, Harrison was ultimately convicted for attempted kidnapping at the conclusion of a trial that began last July. At Monday’s sentencing hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Nichols Jr. focused on how close Currin was to losing her life, and he emphasized Harrison had a long criminal track record. When he was 19, he pleaded guilty to shooting with intent to kill in what Nichols described as a gang-related act wherein a bystander was shot. In 2010, he assaulted a police officer, and in 2012, he was charged with domestic violence, although the charge was dropped after a witness refused to cooperate.
“For all of this, he served a grand total of 10 weeks in county jail,” Nichols said.
Harrison’s attorney, Robert Gifford, rejected the prosecution’s repeated emphasis on Currin’s near-death experience, reminding the court Harrison was not charged with attempted murder.
“We’re trying to [contest] this as some other type of case, but it’s not,” Gifford said. “It’s attempted kidnapping.”
Harrison then gave a lengthy address to the court. He started by acknowledging his disbelief when he was initially sentenced to life in prison, saying he associated such sentences with murderers like Jeffery Dahmer and Charles Manson.
“I am guilty of disbelief, but not of these crimes,” he said.
He compared prison to a pot of boiling water, where one could become hard like an egg, soft like a carrot, or transform the water around them like a coffee bean. He said he was committed to being like a coffee bean.
“I choose to be better,” he said.
As Harrison listed steps he said he had taken to rehabilitate himself, Currin left the room. He apologized to Currin and her mother “for not being available in the manner you wanted me to be,” but he did not take responsibility for Currin’s injuries.
After Harrison finished speaking, Jones announced his sentencing decision. Jones acknowledged that, while the crimes Harrison was convicted of were not by definition inherently violent, “no rational sentient being would characterize them as anything less.” Jones said he “readily recalled” both Currin and Harrison’s testimony.
“But what I do not recall is any genuine expression of guilt,” Jones said.
Based on Harrison’s pre-sentence report, Harrison had an offense level of 39, typically entailing 292 to 365 months of imprisonment. However, Jones said to comply with the four guiding principles of sentencing — retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence and incapacitation — his decision “must vary upward.”
Jones sentenced Harrison to a total of 660 months in prison — or 55 years — with 121 months for illegal possession of ammunition, 300 for attempted kidnapping and 240 for attempted carjacking.
‘I don’t ever see myself being quiet’: Currin continues advocacy
During her statement Monday, Currin said navigating the criminal justice system has been draining for the past four years. After Jones issued his sentence, she said Gifford had subjected her to an intense cross-examination at Harrison’s July trial, insinuating she had played up her story to receive money from Oklahoma’s victims compensation fund.
“As uncomfortable as that day was, I would do it all again,” she said during her statement.
After the sentencing, she acknowledged she may have to.
“I don’t ever see myself being quiet. And I just told the attorney today, I was like, ‘Are you up for going another round?’ And he was like, ‘I was glad that you said I would do it again,’ he said, ‘because I completely see you doing it again,'” Currin said. “We’ll just keep doing it. If he appeals, we’ll just keep going.”
Currin has volunteered with family justice center Palomar for the past two years, and she will continue to advocate for other victims, especially those who have been burnt out by their treatment in the justice system.
“There are some women that don’t have a voice. There’s a lady, she was so passionate about advocating for women, and she went to trial with her ex-husband, and he got 20 days. And she said, ‘I’m done.’ And she has not tried to do anything since,” Currin said. “So that’s always forefront in my mind — like foremost that she got tire — so I have to be her voice now. You don’t always have a lot of women that are willing to go ahead and go through all of this because it’s hard, and you know what they’re capable of and what they’re going to try to make you out to be.”
In particular, red flag firearm laws are important to Currin. Harrison, as a felon, should never have had a gun in the first place, but he had several, Currin said. Further, he was never punished for having a firearm while having an active protective order against him.
“I feel like, if you are going after them for violating those VPOs, for having firearms, it’s almost basically like you’re taking them from them. Even if you can’t physically go in and remove them, are you not looking at it to see, ‘Hey, does this person have an active VPO? They’re not supposed to have a firearm.’ But they don’t even take the VPO into consideration.”
In states with red flag laws, courts may order law enforcement to seize weapons from those deemed a credible threat to others, but Oklahoma preempted any attempts at similar policy with a bill its authors called the “nation’s first anti-red flag law.”
“We’re the only state with the anti-red flag law, and you know, we’re a hunting state and,” Currin said. “Realistically, do I believe that they’ll ever [address] it? I don’t think so.”
Currin said the community should never want women “to think they’re alone.”
“I feel that we’re No. 1 in the nation (in domestic violence), and we’ve got to do better. We have absolutely got to do better,” Currin said. “And you know, I’m so thankful for those ones that go out and fight, because those people in the courtroom, at that table, they fight every day for me, and I’m so glad that I have those group of people.”
Currin said she wants people to remember that domestic violence takes many forms. For instance, Harrison had never struck her until the day he shot her. She encouraged victims to seek out resources and remember they are never alone.
“There are other people out here going through what you went through,” she said.
