photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Zachary Odom appears at his sentencing hearing Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, in Douglas County District Court. His attorney, Branden Smith, is at right.

“He didn’t wake up wanting to kill my dad, but he did,” 16-year-old Kate Schupp told a judge Thursday morning.

Kate was with her father, Skip Schupp, in his 1965 Ford truck on July 18, 2025, when Zachary Odom, high on methadone, recklessly plowed his Ford Focus straight into them, killing Skip and seriously injuring her.

Kate, then 15, phoned her mother, Shelley, and answered “yes” to the hardest question she’d ever been asked in her young life.

“Is Daddy OK?” her mother asked.

She didn’t — couldn’t — respond.

“Is Daddy dead?”

“Yes,” Kate said.

The Schupp family, from Oskaloosa, and their many friends have been trying to make sense of that awful reality for more than a year — from the afternoon that Kate made that phone call and Shelley sat for three hours with her husband’s body on U.S. Highway 40 to Thursday morning, when Judge Nancy Parrish sentenced Odom to 13 years in prison for second-degree murder and aggravated battery.

But there is no making sense, they all agreed. A 51-year-old man, the rock of their family, a “hero,” a “protector,” “Mr. Reliable,” an “exceptional father” and “irreplaceable” husband and friend gone forever because someone who was stoned got behind the wheel.

“He got a death sentence that day, and I don’t have a partner anymore,” Shelley said. “… I don’t know what the word ‘justice’ means. I think it’s very arbitrary.”

Shelley said she didn’t think that Odom meant to hurt anyone that day, but she wanted to be sure that he couldn’t put another family through the agony she and her three daughters had endured.

“I should have had him for way, way longer,” Skip’s middle daughter, Sabrina, 21, told the court as she spoke about the bond she and her dad had, how he put up with her being “a big crybaby” when she was a kid and how he took pride in her every little achievement, even if no one else thought it was a big deal. Her first blood draw as a nursing student — “only Dad thought that was cool.”

To this day, she still sends updates to his phone.

“He doesn’t respond because he’s dead,” she said through tears, but the messages — “they’re there.”

If Sabrina was the crybaby, “I was the complainer,” Kate said, but that never stopped her dad from putting on a silly grin and charming her into doing chores.

“He never really got mad about anything,” she said, expressing sorrow that he could “never really touch someone’s life again.”

Aside from the five people who gave victim impact statements in person, prosecutor Megan Ahsens — choking up herself at times — read a statement from Skip’s sister Carla.

“This is emotional for me too,” Ahsens told the court.

Carla’s statement called Skip her “hero” and “protector” and mourned his death as “preventable.”

“He was loved. He was important,” she wrote. And the family’s “sentence,” unlike Odom’s, would never “have an end date.”

Odom’s brother, Jesse, spoke longer than anyone else, extending his condolences multiple times to the Schupp family but also supporting his 30-year-old brother, who has two kids of his own “who will have to grow up without a father now.”

“I’d just like to say my brother’s not a bad person,” he told the court. “… He has done some good in his life,” and “he will have to live with that burden of taking a life.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/journal-World

Zachary Odom turns to look at his victim’s family at his sentencing hearing Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, in Douglas County District Court. His attorney, Branden Smith, is at right.

When it was his turn to speak, Odom stood with a piece of notebook paper and briefly apologized.

“I do deserve to go to prison,” he said, turning to look at Schupp’s family, and acknowledging that he had taken someone precious from them.

Judge Parrish, following the parties’ joint recommendation, ordered Odom to serve 157 months for reckless second-degree murder and nine months for aggravated battery, to run concurrently, for a term of 13 years.

Odom pleaded guilty to the two charges in August as part of a deal with the state that dropped four other charges: leaving the scene of an accident, a second count of aggravated battery while driving under the influence, no proof of insurance and improper driving on a laned roadway.

He will have 337 days of jail credit to apply toward his sentence. After he serves his term he will be required to register as an offender for 15 years.

Court records indicate that Odom previously served time in prison for aggravated battery in a 2019 case involving a 3-year-old.

Parrish thanked the Schupp family for speaking about their memories and the “very profound loss” they had suffered.

“Your father has touched your lives, and through your memories of him you can touch other lives,” she said.