Billy Joe Shaver’s 2007 shooting outside a bar in Lorena, Texas, led to a trial built around two sharply different accounts of what happened. Shaver acknowledged firing a .22 pistol at Billy Coker, but said he believed Coker was reaching for a weapon and that he acted in self-defense. Witnesses gave jurors a different account.
The confrontation began at Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon, near Waco, where Shaver had stopped with his former wife, Wanda. After an argument with Coker, the two men went outside. At the 2010 trial, witnesses testified that Shaver asked Coker where he wanted to be shot before firing. Shaver told the jury he feared an attack.
The competing accounts became central to the aggravated-assault case. Willie Nelson and actor Robert Duvall were among the friends who appeared in support of Shaver as the trial drew attention. The jury ultimately found him not guilty.
Outside the courthouse, Shaver said he was sorry the incident had happened. He also joked that perhaps he and Coker might one day become friendly enough for Coker to give him the bullet back—a remark that mixed regret with the dark humor for which the story is often remembered.
From courtroom to song
The episode did not remain only a legal matter. Shaver later turned it into “Wacko From Waco,” making the shooting part of the outlaw-country storytelling that had marked his work for decades. His songs had already helped shape Waylon Jennings’ “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and the Lorena case brought an unusually direct real-life episode into that body of writing.
Shaver’s life had included other hardships: he lost fingers in a sawmill accident, survived a massive heart attack and endured the deaths of his wife Brenda and son Eddy. The shooting added another complicated chapter, one that cannot be told accurately without keeping the courtroom’s opposing versions in view. The jury accepted Shaver’s self-defense claim; the song came afterward, carrying the incident into his musical legacy.
