He’s facing a second charge, this time with murder in wife’s 2020 death stemming from 2007 shooting

ELIZABETHTOWN — Mark Timothy Sykes has been arrested and charged a second time in connection to shooting his wife in June 2007.

The new charge, announced in a release on Monday by the Bladen County Sheriff’s Office, is first-degree murder. Sykes was charged in 2008 with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury; he served four years, four months in prison.

The latest charge comes 14 years to the day since the shooting.

After the shooting, for 13 years, Jennifer Sykes experienced complications from the wound. In March 2020, she died as a result of those difficulties. An autopsy by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Raleigh ruled the cause of death to be “complications of a remote gunshot wound to the abdomen,” the release said.

Sykes, of the 2600 block of Berry Lewis Road in Bladenboro, was jailed without bail.