Death in Nogales
November 20, 2024 at 06:30PMOn January 30, 2023, a forty-eight-year-old Mexican man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea was shot dead in southern Arizona. The man who shot him was almost certainly George Allan Kelly, a retiree living on 170 acres of ranch land, which Cuen Buitimea was walking across in an effort to make his way into America. But the question at the heart of this story isn’t whether Kelly is guilty—though that is, of course, addressed. It’s why so many people, both living close to the border and not, support vigilante violence:
Many Americans continue to be astonished and offended that they might be punished for killing a migrant on the border. In the months after Kelly’s arrest, 12,000 people signed a petition asking for his release. Online fundraisers collected almost half a million dollars, which he used to pay bail. Early fans left comments making clear that they supported Kelly not because they thought he was innocent—framed for the killing—but because, as in any perceived wartime, killing had become the patriotic thing to do. One YouTube comment on a video of the preliminary hearing reads, “Only stopping these invaders in this way—no matter sex or age—will send the signal to stop this invasion.”
If, as these fans believed, Kelly was in the right and the law was in the wrong, the only thing to do was to change the law. Arizona already had a stand-your-ground law, known as a castle doctrine, which allows people to use deadly force against trespassers to protect their home. But the law didn’t seem to apply here: nobody had tried to enter or harm the Kelly house. In February 2024, about a month before Kelly’s trial, Arizona Republicans conveniently attempted to close this “loophole.” Citing “increasingly larger numbers of migrants or human traffickers moving across farm and ranch land,” a state representative proposed an amendment expanding the castle doctrine to apply to any part of one’s property. The bill passed the Arizona house and senate along party lines. During the third week of the trial, Democratic governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it. The legislation, she wrote, “would further embolden a culture of armed vigilantism.”
Such a culture was present at the trial, which began on March 21. During jury selection, a priest who said that “life is more important than property” was excused because of his work commitments; a landscaper who doubted whether people in the country illegally should enjoy “the protection of the law” was seated.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/20/death-in-nogales/
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