By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – The acquittal yesterday of a 31-year-old National Guardsman charged in the gunshot death of his girlfriend was not necessarily a reason to celebrate, according to his attorney.
Jesse Karr was found not guilty yesterday of fatally shooting 28-year-old Sara M. Whitson in Sept. 2009 in the Chehalis apartment they shared. He said the handgun accidentally discharged as he was unloading it.
Jesse Karr
“There’s no winner in this case,” defense attorney Don McConnell said after the verdict.
“This poor guy’s gone through a lot of emotional trauma, this was the love of his life,” McConnell said.
Karr, 29, had just returned from Iraq about a month earlier and moved in with the woman he’d dated off and on for about four years, according to witness testimony.
He had offered to clean her .22 caliber handgun, and the weapon – which operated in the exact opposite way of his, according to his attorney – went off in his hand, shooting him in his finger and Whitson in the abdomen. She died during emergency surgery.
In the trial that began in Lewis County Superior Court on Monday, Deputy Prosecutor Colin Hayes told jurors it was a reckless act, by a man who’d never even seen the gun before.
“He wasn’t quite sure how to get the magazine out, he didn’t ask how to get it out, he didn’t ask about the safety,” Hayes told jurors during the three-day trial.
Karr was charged with first-degree manslaughter in February 2010.
A jury of eight women and four men deliberated a little more than seven hours over two days, and returned their verdict just before lunch yesterday. Not guilty of first-degree manslaughter and not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
McConnell said that’s the outcome he expected, for an accident.
“It’s the way it happened, it’s the way it was,” he said. “It’s the way he told everyone from day one.”
The Centralia attorney said the shooting was a tragedy for everyone, for family, for friends, for his client.
“He’s got to live with this for the rest of his life,” McConnell said.
Hayes was disappointed, but said it was the jury’s decision.
“The jury heard the evidence and weighed it and decided he did not commit a crime,” Hayes said yesterday.
“We never contended it was not an accident,” he said. “Just reckless, or at least negligent.”
It’s the second time already this year McConnell has gotten an acquittal for a client in Lewis County Superior Court.
Two weeks ago, a jury found Jaime Roberto Hernandez not guilty of second-degree assault in what prosecutors described as an attack on a DeGoede Bulb Farm worker with a garden hoe by his supervisor. The first trial, held the first week in January, ended with a hung jury.
Newly-elected Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer – McConnell’s former law partner – has “walled off” cases such as Karr’s and Hernandez’s, those which previously involved their firm.
Meyer has arranged for supervision on those cases to be handled by his Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Brad Meagher.
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter
As a gun owner herself, shouldn’t the girlfriend had known better than to hand someone a loaded weapon for cleaning purposes? I’m not even a gun owner and yet I have enough common sense to know that you should take the magazine out and check the chamber before handing a live weapon to another person.
This certainly doesn’t excuse what happened or make up for her death, but damned if it’s not one of those things that could have been incredibly easy to avoid had anyone actually been thinking properly.
And what’s his excuse, anyway? He’s in the armed forces.