On Monday, prosecutors in Arizona decided not to re-try George Alan Kelly after his prosecution resulted in a hung jury last week.
Kelly, you may remember, is the Arizona rancher who was accused of shooting and killing a Mexican national named Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, who was illegally trespassing on his property. Gabriel had previously been caught illegally in the United States several times before his death. He was most recently deported in 2016.
As this trial got underway, I defended Kelly based on a pretty simple principle, which is that American citizens have a right to defend their property, their families, and themselves. That’s all we really needed to know about this case. Those men had no right to be on his property. And in this case they didn’t even have the right to be in the country, let alone his property. It is an egregious miscarriage of justice to prosecute a man for defending his property from illegal invaders — invaders who are illegal two times over.
But I have to admit that, until I looked more closely into the trial, I had no idea exactly how outrageous this prosecution was. I didn’t fully understand the extent of the depravity that motivated these prosecutors to ruin the life of a rancher in his 70s because he exercised his right of self-defense. However unjust you think this case is, it’s worse than that.
As I’ll explain in a moment, at trial, the prosecution couldn’t even prove that Kelly was responsible for killing Gabriel. In other words, it’s not just that the prosecution failed to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt, which is their burden. The prosecution also failed to prove that Kelly had committed any form of homicide at all. Apparently, a single, lone juror is the only reason that George Alan Kelly wasn’t acquitted outright. And after you hear what happened in this case, the idea that even one juror would want to convict is truly unbelievable.
Let’s begin with the prosecution’s opening statement. This is where the state had the opportunity to tease its star witness, a Honduran national named Daniel Ramirez. Supposedly, Ramirez — who was also illegally on Kelly’s property — witnessed Kelly murder Gabriel in cold blood. And Ramirez’s testimony, the prosecutors suggested, would be airtight. Watch:
That’s the prosecution’s promise, and it sets the bar pretty high. Gabriel’s “companion” — not his criminal accomplice, but his companion, the prosecutor says — saw Gabriel get shot in the back because this maniac rancher was shooting wildly at them. “That is State v. George Alan Kelly in a nutshell,” says the prosecutor.
Well, that turned out to be true, although not in the way the prosecutor intended.
Behold the testimony of star witness Daniel Ramirez:
It’s painful to listen to. Yet, through the translator, we learn that Ramirez can’t remember much of anything — including what he said under oath, during the trial, right before the lunch break. This is the “companion” who was supposed to convince us that he remembers everything about the day that George Kelly murdered his buddy for no reason, out of the blue.
We can’t cover all of the testimony because it’s long and excruciating to listen to. But suffice it to say, there were so many inconsistencies with what Ramirez said that he was worse than useless as a witness. For example, Ramirez said that he was with Gabriel just a few meters away from the house when the shooting happened, but the body was found more than 100 yards away from the house. Additionally, Ramirez said the shots went towards the house, which makes no sense. When he spoke to police, Ramirez first said that the shooting occurred west of Nogales, only to change his mind when he was told where the rancher actually lived. And on top of all that, Ramirez insisted that he saw his companion “fall backward,” but the body was discovered face down.
Oh, and Ramirez happens to be a drug smuggler (although he initially lied about that as well), and he’s been caught trying to illegally enter this country between 8 and 10 times.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Now, if you want to give the prosecution the benefit of the doubt for some reason, you might discount all of this. You might say that this is one unreliable witness, and surely the rest of their case was solid. But actually, the fact that their star witness has the memory of a goldfish was just the beginning of the state’s problems. The larger issue was that, under the prosecution’s theory of the case, none of George Alan Kelly’s actions on the day of the shooting made any sense whatsoever.
Here’s the timeline. In early January 2023, a Border Patrol agent and liaison, who frequently speaks to ranchers in the area, advised Kelly by text message several times that illegal aliens were traveling through the area in large groups: “Some may have had narcotics,” the agent texted to Kelly. These kinds of texts continued throughout the month.
Then on January 30th, several illegals were spotted by Border Patrol in the desert of Kino Springs, Arizona, and fled. At least two of them ended up on Kelly’s ranch — at which point, as he was making lunch, Kelly says he heard a gunshot. He calls the police, rushes outside, and fires several warning shots from his rifle. Kelly insists that the police come to his property. They conduct a full sweep — they’re mistakenly looking for an active shooter at this point — and don’t find anything.
Then, hours later, Kelly finds the body and calls 911 voluntarily to report it. He doesn’t hide any shell casings. He doesn’t bury the body on his 170-acre property — as he could and would have if this was a murder. He immediately reports it.
That’s not exactly consistent with the theory that Kelly is a murderer who just shot someone in cold blood. Normally, murderers don’t call the police and tell them to come search their remote property so that they can find a body. And then, if police miss the body, murderers don’t call the cops to inform them of that fact and invite them back onto their remote property. But that’s the prosecution’s theory here. The police came back to the ranch and decided very quickly that Kelly must have killed Gabriel — even though they couldn’t find the fatal bullet anywhere.
This isn’t exactly solid logic, so instead of explaining it, the prosecution spent the rest of their opening statement lying about the 911 call about the body. Listen:
Well, that sounds pretty bad. Supposedly, when Kelly was calling 911 to report that he had found a dead body, he called the man an “animal.” The implication, of course, is that he’s a bigoted MAGA Republican who thinks everyone from Mexico isn’t human. But the problem with this argument is that, even if Kelly had called Gabriel an “animal,” it would be totally defensible based solely on his actions. This guy was a criminal, a repeat offender who continually and illegally trespassed into this country. It would be understandable if Kelly was angry and used unkind words to describe the dead intruder. And it wouldn’t prove that he was guilty of felony homicide.
But if you listen to the full 911 tape, you discover that actually, Kelly wasn’t calling this guy an animal because of his actions, or because of his nationality or ethnicity or anything like that.
What happened is that Kelly very clearly didn’t want to provide any more statements to the police than he needed to. He had a vague idea — which would later be proven to be very correct — that the police would seek to use everything he said against him. So he didn’t want to be specific. He just wanted an officer to be dispatched to his property.
This is a longer clip but it’s important to get the context to understand how deranged the prosecutor’s lies were. Listen:
It’s a strange call, there’s no doubt about it. But it’s clear from that audio that Kelly is not making any kind of commentary on the person he just shot. He’s not saying illegals are animals or whatever. Nor is he trying to hide that there’s a dead human body on the property. Instead, he’s trying, albeit clumsily, to get police to his property while not admitting anything that, in his mind, might incriminate him. Of course, the prosecution (and the media) had to insinuate otherwise, because they know they don’t have an actual case. So, they decided that it’s best to just accuse this 70-something rancher of being a racist because of this phone call.
There were other low points for the prosecution, like how they kept claiming that Gabriel was trying to live out the “American dream” — even though he showed up on Kelly’s property dressed in camouflage, wearing tactical boots, and equipped with an encrypted two-way radio.
Somehow — despite that evidence — the police testified that they never considered the possibility that maybe he was a drug smuggler. It was farcical. But maybe the lowest point was prosecutors’ attempt to question Kelly’s wife, Wanda. It was important for prosecutors to try to discredit Wanda, because she testified that she saw the trespassers with firearms and camo backpacks. Watch:
Here the prosecutors are trying to do to Wanda what the defense attorneys did to Ramirez. Except it doesn’t work.
Ramirez can’t remember what he said before lunch, where the crime scene was, what direction the shots came from or what happened to his “companion” after he was hit. By contrast, Wanda couldn’t recall the precise number of gunshots that she heard during a moment of extreme stress. This is supposedly the prosecution’s “gotcha” moment.”
The point was apparently to distract from the fact that the prosecution doesn’t actually have any evidence that Kelly even killed Gabriel. Because they never recovered a bullet, they couldn’t do any ballistics matching to determine whose gun fired the fatal shot. For all the authorities know, Gabriel could’ve been shot somewhere off-site and dragged to the ranch. Or he could have been shot on-site by someone else, and maybe that was the bullet that Kelly says he heard. The prosecution has no definitive answer to any of this. Their entire case hinges, instead, on an elderly couple not recalling the precise amount of warning shots that were fired.
Now, have you heard any of these details? Probably not. I hadn’t heard many of these details either. The reason I decided to do a deeper dive into this case is that I saw a thread from the account “Rosie Memos” the other day on Twitter. She unearthed several incredible videos, including this footage of the Sheriff in Santa Cruz County falsely accusing Kelly of being an outsider and an “extremist” who wanted to “hunt me some Mexicans.” Watch:
The sheriff is lying about the contents of Kelly’s book, for one thing. It’s not about “hunting” Mexicans. It’s about a rancher who fights drug cartels. And that’s not a crazy topic to write about when you’re constantly hearing from Border Patrol that drug cartels are running through your property. And of course Kelly isn’t an outsider. He lived on that property for more than a decade.
Right away, that gives you a sense of how completely one-sided this whole prosecution was.
They decided to make an example of George Kelly and didn’t bother with building a real case. In fact the authorities didn’t do any real forensic work whatsoever. As I mentioned, they didn’t find the bullet. They also never found any gunshot residue and never tested the backpack that the trespassers were carrying for any gunshot residue.
And, if you watch the trial and the various interviews, you’ll notice that the police decided very quickly that they were going to charge George Kelly. Their strategy was to interview Kelly and his wife multiple times, get them to say as much as possible, and then use any contradiction — however minor — as proof that Kelly is a murderer. If you needed yet more reason to never talk to the police unless it’s absolutely necessary, this is it.
Even though Kelly is now free to go back to his life, the fact remains that the government tried to send this elderly man to prison for a “crime” that, even if he had committed, he would have been justified in doing so. And yet there is no direct evidence that he did commit it. There’s no way to explain why this prosecution occurred unless you understand that the state wants us to be helpless, demoralized and vulnerable. They are intentionally flooding our country with criminals and then punishing us if we do anything to protect ourselves from the wave of criminality they have invited into our lives and onto our properties. Now they’re going after just about anyone who has the audacity to take any steps to protect themselves.
They want to terminate the right of self-defense, in addition to your property rights. It’s heinous. And somehow even more terrifying — judging by the fact that a juror somehow wanted to convict Kelly on these facts — is that more and more people seem to be fine with that.