LAKESIDE – Shane Michael Badding was sentenced to six years in prison after a hearing in the Navajo County Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Badding was charged on three separate counts, including aggravated assault, by pointing out a grandmother and two deputy sheriffs who were found to be an air rifle on June 25, 2020. Another file alleged that Badding threatened to stab a good Samaritan in the leg who drove Badding to Flagstaff for a medical appointment in March 2020. The third charge included five crimes that Badding stole a neighbor’s boat and sold it around November 2019.
After aiming the rifle at a grandmother in her car and at two MPs, a MP shot him in the leg and Badding was taken down to the valley for treatment. He appeared in court with a stroller.
The sentencing was scheduled for 11 am on May 28 in Judge Ralph Hatch’s courtroom. The state was represented by Assistant District Attorney Blaine C. Rhoton; Badding’s retained Lakeside attorney Eduardo H. Coronado appeared at the defense table. Regarding the stabbing threat, the parties agreed that Badding would bring a charge of disorderly behavior, a class 6 crime, and receive a three-year suspended sentence. The case of the stolen boat was dismissed with the consent of the victim, who not only wrote a letter to the court in favor of Badding, but actually appeared in person for conviction and spoke to the judge in public in support of Badding. Despite this case being dismissed, Badding still has to pay this victim $ 5,000.
The three assaults
However, the plea agreement gave the court ample leeway to deal with the three aggravated charges against the grandmother and two MPs. Badding was entitled to probation, but faced a prison sentence of between two and 8.75 years. The “presumed sentence” as the law calls it is 3.75 years for each charge; The probation department drew up an attendance report to help the judge decide the sentence and recommended five years in prison. And so began the presentations and arguments from each side.
Rhoton went first. He played a DVD with a deputy body camera and an audio recording of an interview with the deputy who conducted the shooting for the court. A male and female vicarious agent had responded to Badding’s house after it was reported that he had let go of a dog or dogs on children. After that, the children’s grandmother drove her car into Badding’s driveway to talk to him about the incident, and Badding pointed a gun at her.
The footage from the body camera was staggering. The MPs yelled at Badding at least 30 times to “lay down your gun!” and that the MPs wanted to speak to Badding and that “We don’t want this to end badly,” the MPs pleaded. In response, Badding can be heard repeatedly shouting back: “(Explicitly) you! Get the (expletive) ones out of here! This is Arizona and I’m on my own property! “At some point Badding assumed what the deputy described as a crouching, possibly shooting position, and the deputy saw a reflection through the scope of the rifle. The rifle was aimed at the MPs. A shot rang out and the MPs heard: “He’s on the porch, he’s downstairs! Shots fired! “
When it was the defense’s turn, defense attorney Coronado told the court that Badding had taken responsibility for his unacceptable behavior. Coronado said there are things the court should know about that weren’t caught on body camera. First, that Badding has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and that he allegedly drinks excessively that he drank that night. The defense attorney said the dogs were not at large but on a long leash that had become tangled when the dogs became “upset” after being raised by neighborhood children, which was an ongoing problem. Badding himself told the judge that children would shoot air-soft pellets at the dogs and that a dog might have come loose that night when Badding tried to untangle the long leash.
These paranoid high anxiety episodes are also triggered in Badding by certain events that are part of his disorder. Coronado told the court that armed MPs showed up at Badding in November 2019 to arrest him for boat theft, entered his home without a warrant, handcuffed him and put him in a patrol car for an hour before freeing him had and left. Badding, the attorney said, is suing the sheriff in federal court for violating his constitutional law under the Fourth Search and Seizure Amendment.
Judge Hatch focused on the past life events that caused the PSTD in Badding. Was the boat theft arrest without guarantee the beginning of Badding’s problem in that regard? It seemed to take forever to get a straight answer from the judge. Badding said his disorder appeared years ago in prison and witnessed fighting and rioting there. The plea agreement pertains to a previous Waukesha County crime conviction in 1993, but does not identify the charges. It is not known whether Badding was in jail in connection with this conviction.
For his part, Badding reiterated his claim that his actions were influenced by his PTSD and that he was treated for alcoholism as well as for it. He said he would need back surgery and rehab afterwards. Regarding that night, Badding claimed that on June 25th he was blinded by floodlights pointed at him by MPs, that MPs had not turned on the emergency lights on their vehicles, that anyone can claim they are officers, only because the MPs said they didn’t make it happen. This Badding looked through the telescopic sight of the rifle to see better that night that he had lost his home, his belongings and his dogs, that he had already spent almost a year in the county jail, that neither he nor himself would be jailed would still do something good for the church and that he wanted the chance to prove his recovery in court. Finally, that he deserves a parole because Judge Hatch “can send me to jail anytime during the probationary period.”
“You’re going to jail,” Hatch said to Badding. But before reaching the number of years, Hatch wanted to know the details of the knife incident in March 2020. The lawyers said that a friendly friend drove Badding to Flagstaff and on the way back Badding was very drunk, brandished a knife and threatened to stab the lady in the leg. Badding said he had no memory of the incident. Hatch said the court would follow the agreement on those charges, a probation agreement, but that Badding was “fortunate” to have that solution.
Finally, the judge told Badding that he was “lucky to be alive” given the situation that night and that it could very well have ended differently, as many police shootings do. Hatch noted that pointing a gun at a “little old grandmother” and assistant sheriffs who were just doing their jobs were acts worth years of imprisonment. Both the lawyers and the judge mentioned that officers don’t have to wait to find out if a scope pointed at them is really a firearm. Eventually, Hatch noted that Badding was also fortunate enough to have received six years that it could have been “much, much worse”. In the end, the court and the parties exchanged grateful and best wishes, and Badding was led away with his hiker by an armed detention officer.
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