Two now facing murder charges in Shiner man’s shooting death

Two murder arrests have now been made in a deadly shooting case that claimed the life of a Shiner man last year, following the latest round of felony indictments issued by the Lavaca County grand jury.

The first of those arrests took place back in March 2023 with the incarceration of Michael Joseph McKim, then age 44, of Flatonia. He stands accused in the shooting death of Jason Pilat, 47, of Shiner, early Sunday, March 5, 2023.

According to the sheriff’s department account given at that time, McKim and his daughter had gone in search of McKim’s wife, who they ultimately tracked down via her cellphone to Pilat’s property, whereupon they pulled into the drive and confronted them both.

Before making that confrontation, however, Sheriff Micah Harmon said in his initial report that McKim first retrieved a 9 mm handgun from inside his wife’s parked car, located just outside the residence where she and Pilat were found. It was the same handgun investigators would later call “the murder weapon.”

Although Pilat was rushed to a city hospital when paramedics arrived, he ultimately succumbed to injuries a few days later, Harmon said at the time.

McKim, who then worked as postmaster in Flatonia, was arrested the same day and without incident. He actually made the call to report it, Harmon said back in 2023, and then waited for officers to arrive at the scene in the 3400-block of U.S. 90 Alternate, between Shiner and Wied.

He was booked into Lavaca County Jail on March 5, 2023, for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, for which he posted a $100,000 bail and was soon released.

Following Pilat’s passing away a few days later, McKim was arrested once more, on March 22, 2023, on the charge of murder, for which he once again posted bail— this time, set at $500,000—and he was released once more, just three days hence.

Despite there being a few case documents filed during months since, mostly to reschedule various court appearances and pretrial hearings, little changed in McKim’s case until late last month, when on Sept. 25, the Lavaca County grand jury handed down a felony indictment on the murder charge, almost 19 months—570 days, in all—since the shooting occurred.

New to his court record was another docket reset filed Monday, Oct. 7, in the Second 25th District Court. A pretrial hearing is set for Feb. 26, 2025, with McKim’s nonjury trial date to take place March 4, 2025, a day shy of two years since the grim incident took place.

While state law establishes a statute of limitations of as few as three years for some felony crimes—marking the time between an incident’s occurrence and the indictment of the accused—no such limitation exists for the crime of murder.

Also new to the Pilat murder case, as of the Sept. 25 indictments, was the naming of second defendant: 21-year-old Kayla Marie McKim, the elder McKim’s daughter.

She was arrested at her and her father’s Flatonia home and booked in the Lavaca County Jail on Wednesday, Oct. 2, on the single murder charge. Like her father, she too posted bail to secure her release, though hers ($250,000) was half that of her father’s.

According to the sheriff’s 2023 account of what led to Pilat’s shooting, Kayla allegedly acted as navigator with the cell phone technology, having reportedly set up communications between the two devices well before their ride out that fateful night.

Little mention was made of her involvement upon their arrival at Pilat’s property, however, and more recent attempts to reach Sheriff Harmon for comment have proven unsuccessful.

Still, the two McKim indictments read nearly identical apart from their names—stating that both “knowingly and intentionally cause(d) the death of an individual, namely Jason Pilat, by shooting him in the head.”

The prosecutor’s office explained away the difference in bail with the concept of complicity, as defined by the Texas Penal Code. It basically says that if someone aids in the commission of a felony crime, or for that matter, fails to stop it, they can be held just as responsible for the crime as if they had done it themselves.

“If you give me a ride to the store for me to steal beer for us, and while stealing the beer, I punch the store clerk in the nose, the law of parties says you’re just as guilty as I am for hitting that man and robbing him, even if you sit in truck the entire time,” assistant prosecutor James Reeves said.