Emailing: Arizona Man Sentenced to 90 Days in Jail for Car Murder

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Arizona Man Sentenced to 90 Days in Jail for Car Murder

Further evidence that our rights continue to dwindle: now it's apparently illegal for a man to put his own Camaro out of its misery.

Police in Kingman, Arizona, said that Lauriano Lovato had become fed up with his car after it failed to start, and put two rounds through the dashboard. Hearing the gunshots, neighbors called police, and they responded by surrounding the house and calling in a SWAT team. The AP report on this story is a little misleading because it says that Lovato was "eventually arrested after a lengthy standoff," which is true if a "standoff" includes a situation where the guy inside is fast asleep.

According to the Kingman Daily Miner, police established a perimeter and then tried for seven hours to communicate with the shooter, who was believed to be inside the home. He was. When the SWAT team eventually breached the front door to resolve the situation, it found Lovato on a couch in the back room. He said, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence to the contrary, that he had been asleep and totally unaware that his house had been surrounded by armed men for most of the day. He just executed his car and then went back to bed.

Eventually, Lovato pleaded guilty to discharging a firearm within city limits with criminal negligence, and last month he was sentenced to 90 days in jail. This seems a little harsh for an offense that harmed no one and put no property at risk other than a God damn Camaro that decided it wasn't gonna start for what turned out to be the last time. But none of the statutory exceptions seem to apply to his case.

Ironically, had Lovato and the doomed Camaro been "more than one mile from any occupied structure," an exception would have applied and the shooting would have been legal. But how was he supposed to get the thing out of town when the whole problem was that it wouldn't start? One of those Catch-22s, i guess.

August 07, 2011 in Crime and Punishment | Permalink