Trial starts for Arizona border rancher charged with killing migrant on his property
PHOENIX — An Arizona rancher is on trial in the fatal shooting of a migrant on his property near Mexico, as the national debate over border security heats up ahead of this year’s presidential election.
George Alan Kelly, 75, is charged with second-degree murder in the killing of a man he encountered on his property outside Nogales, Ariz. The jury trial in Santa Cruz County Superior Court started Friday and is expected to last up to a month.
Kelly earlier rejected a deal that would have reduced the charge to one count of negligent homicide if he pleaded guilty.
He was arrested and charged last year in the Jan. 30, 2023, fatal shooting of 48-year-old Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea of adjacent Nogales, Mexico, just south of the border. Kelly shot at a group of unarmed migrants, including Cuen-Buitimea, who were walking through his nearly 170-acre cattle ranch in the Kino Springs area, authorities said.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called Texas’ immigration law ‘dehumanizing,’ as U.S. courts weighed whether it can be enforced.
Kelly’s defense attorney Brenna Larkin has maintained that he shot into the air above the migrants because he feared for his safety and that of his wife and property. Larkin testified Friday that migrants crossing through Kelly’s property had grown increasingly menacing over the years and included drug and human smugglers, prompting him to arm himself for protection.
Prosecutors have said Kelly recklessly fired an AK-47 rifle toward the migrants, about 100 yards away. Kelly also had a handgun.
“I want you to consider Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea as a human being, and not as George Kelly described him — an animal,” Santa Cruz County Chief Deputy Atty. Kim Hunley told jurors Friday.
Kelly is also charged with aggravated assault that day against another person in the group of about eight.
Texas’ controversial immigration law is on hold again after court moves that confounded the Biden administration and spurred outrage from Mexico’s government.
Hunley said the group had scattered after seeing Border Patrol agents and were headed back to the border to return to Mexico when the shooting occurred. The other migrants weren’t injured and made it back to Mexico.
Cuen-Buitimea had entered the U.S. illegally several times and was convicted and deported, most recently in 2016, court records show.
The case is being watched closely by the Mexican consulate in Nogales, Ariz., which has been in contact with the victim’s family.
The shooting came less than six months after a prison warden and his twin brother were arrested and charged in a West Texas shooting that killed one migrant and wounded another. Michael and Mark Sheppard, 60, were charged with manslaughter in the September 2022 shooting in El Paso County.
The brothers pulled over their truck near a town about 25 miles from the border and opened fire on migrants who were getting water along the road, authorities said. Florida news media reported last fall that the brothers were out on bond and living in the state.
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