An unarmed Mexican man was shot as he crossed an Arizona ranch. The case against the ranch owner has prompted a backlash among supporters who say he is the real victim.
To conservative ranchers and far-flung immigration critics who seized on the case as it ricocheted across social media, Kelly, 74, was the real victim in a murky tale of death and justice in Arizona’s politically volatile borderlands.
In court papers, Kelly’s lawyer offered a sharply different account, saying that Kelly and his wife were eating lunch when they heard a gunshot. Kelly went to his porch to investigate, the court papers say, and in the distance he spotted a group of camouflage-clad men with assault rifles crossing his property. He fired warning shots over their heads after one of the men pointed a rifle at him, his lawyer said in court documents.
“The border is out of control,” said John Ladd, a rancher outside Naco, Arizona, who said he had found 16 migrants’ bodies on his land and had seen people with 30-foot ladders scaling sections of border wall by his ranch. “Everybody’s just sick of it. When you think your life’s threatened and your wife — everybody has a certain point where enough is enough.”
“It’s a very peaceful and tranquil area,” said Sheriff David Hathaway, an elected Democrat. He said he and his wife take sunset walks not far from where the shooting happened. To Kelly, the mesquite-fringed stretch of land where the shooting occurred represented a late-life dream when he and his wife bought the property in 2002.
Kelly was a stranger to many commercial ranchers in the area. Some called him a “hobby rancher” in contrast to larger operations that graze hundreds of cattle. In a self-published 2013 novel, “Far Beyond the Border Fence,” Kelly conjured the persona of a border rancher named George who patrols his “war zone” ranch. George gets into gunfights with traffickers and heads into Mexico to rescue abducted family members.
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