A Hilltown Township man is headed to state prison, after pleading guilty on Friday to 14 charges stemming from a series of three related incidents that occurred in August 2020.
According to a release from the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, 29-year-old William Winecker, of Upper Church Road, was sentenced to 2-to-4-years in state prison after pleading guilty to five counts of prohibited possession of a firearm, one count each of tampering with physical evidence, hindering apprehension or prosecution by concealing or destroying evidence, firearms not to be carried without a license and possession of an instrument of crime, and other related offenses.
Winecker will receive credit for 203 days of time served, and upon his release, he will also be required to serve six years of probation, according to court documents.
"This defendant was a public menace,” District Attorney Matt Weintraub said. “Due to the great work of Hilltown Officers Jim Browne and Matthew Reiss, Deputy District Attorney Megan Hunsicker, and Bucks County Detectives, he is behind bars for the next two to four years.
The trio of incidents began on August 10, 2020, at the Walmart parking lot on Bethlehem Pike, when Hilltown Police received a call regarding an armed male suspect — later identified as Winecker — who pointed a gun at a woman and her 10-year-old daughter and asked if they “wanted to die today.”
The woman and her child were able to hide behind a vehicle, at which point Winecker fled the scene, investigators said.
A review of the surveillance footage showed that, prior to the incident, Winecker had dropped off at woman at the Walmart. That woman, later identified as Winecker’s mother, would then positively identify the suspect as her own son, investigators said.
Then, during the early-morning hours of August 11, 2020, police were dispatched to a home on Upper Church Road for a domestic assault in progress. Upon arrival, police said they encountered Winecker’s mother, who stated that her son had assaulted her and broken her television because she had cooperated with police the previous day.
Winecker was taken into custody on Aug. 14, 2020, and remanded to the Bucks County Correctional Facility after failing to post 10% of $25,000 bail.
Following his arrest, Hilltown Police executed a search warrant on the Upper Church Road home, which lead to the discovery of a loaded handgun, two loaded rifles and a loaded shotgun hidden in the attic of the home. Winecker was prohibited from owning or possessing a firearm due to a prior conviction, according to the district attorney’s office.
Investigators said the weapons that were retrieved from the home were completed “ghost guns,” and did not have serial numbers on them. Additionally, they stated that they also retrieved 80% receivers, gun-making tools, parts and components.
“During the investigation, Hilltown police learned that after the Walmart incident, Winecker hid all his gun tools, parts and completed firearms in the attic of his mother’s home in Hilltown and went to his grandmother’s house in Hackettstown, New Jersey, with the gun he pulled on the woman at Walmart,” reads a portion of the statement from the district attorney’s office.
Police said they were unable to retrieve the weapon used in the incident at Walmart, however a review of prison phone calls lead investigators to believe that Winecker used coded language to instruct his grandmother to dispose of the weapon. The grandmother would later inform police that she threw the weapon in the river, however attempts by police to retrieve the gun were unsuccessful.
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