IRS agent not guilty of involuntary manslaughter

PHOENIX (CN) — A federal agent accused of shooting and killing a colleague is not guilty of involuntary manslaughter of a federal officer.

Internal Revenue Service Special Agent Larry Brown sobbed as the judge read the not-guilty verdict, later embracing his mother as the two of them cried in a Phoenix courtroom Wednesday afternoon.

Brown accidentally shot Special Agent Patrick Bauer in the torso after a firearms safety training at a federal gun range in north Phoenix on Aug. 17, 2023. While no cameras or witnesses caught the shooting, other agents heard Brown yelling, “I fucked up, I shot Pat,” as he ran from the small room in which the shooting occurred. He later told a first responder that he was “involved in the accidental discharge.”

While Brown doesn’t deny that a bullet fired from his weapon pierced six of Bauer’s internal organs, causing massive internal bleeding, he claims that the real culprit is the “avalanche of failures” IRS agents committed that delayed emergency treatment that otherwise would have saved Bauer’s life.

Brown faced a single charge of involuntary manslaughter of a federal officer that would have carried up to eight years in prison had the jury not acquitted him.

Courtroom spectators, many of whom were family members of Bauer, yelled epithets at the defendant as they left.

“You fucking coward! You killed my fucking brother, and you fucking know it, you piece of shit!” one woman yelled as she exited the courtroom.

“Piece of shit,” a man yelled. “I’ll show you something nice.”

One woman threw her purse at the wall in anger, but Brown’s family members shared relieved embraces.

Just two hours earlier, the government made its closing arguments in the case, asking jurors to “use your common sense” and convict Brown.

“This was not an accident,” federal prosecutor Monica Ryan said in a federal courtroom in Phoenix Wednesday morning. “This was reckless.”

Ryan argued that Brown acted with gross negligence by taking his weapon out of his holster in “the tower” — a small cement structure on the shooting range from which an instructor can give orders. Multiple witnesses told the jury during the two-week trial that there’s never a reason to unholster a weapon in the tower.

The prosecutor argued that the shooting was a “proximate cause” of Bauer’s death. She recalled the testimony of Kevin Horn, a forensic pathologist and the Maricopa County medical examiner who autopsied Bauer and said last week that Bauer’s injuries were so severe that he would likely have died regardless of how soon he received emergency medical care. 

For Brown’s Glock 19 to have fired, government witnesses said in trial that the trigger must have been pulled, even by accident. For that to happen, Brown would have had to disregard basic gun safety rules, Ryan said.

“Death is a foreseeable result when agents don’t follow those rules,” she added.

Brown’s defense attorney, Jason Lamm of Jason D. Lamm Attorney at Law, argued that the government left too many questions unanswered.

“You can’t say that Agent Bauer didn’t ask Agent Brown to unholster his weapon,” he told the jury, referring to the time the two of them were alone in the tower before Bauer was shot. 

Lamm said nobody knows whether Brown’s gun went off outside of Brown’s control or if Bauer touched Brown’s gun before it fired. And it’s the government’s burden to prove “the how and the why,” Lamm told the jury.

Brown’s defense did not stipulate any of those hypotheticals as fact, and Brown declined to take the stand to explain. Brown never claimed not to have pulled the trigger, although Lamm objected more than once during trial when prosecutors suggested that he did so. 

After the shooting, IRS agents removed the loaded weapon and spent shell casing from the ground and put them on the counter, but the gun was unseen in later photographs of the crime scene.

Lamm said investigators didn’t properly test the gun to see if it would discharge without a trigger pull, nullifying any claims of negligence on Brown’s behalf.

“Gross negligence?” Lamm asked. “Quite the opposite. He called 911. He applied chest seals. Larry Brown was the only one who tried to enlist help from other officers at the range.”

Because the IRS lacked an emergency response plan, agents didn’t know what address to give dispatch when they called, leading to a five-minute delay between the call and the dispatch of emergency vehicles. The ambulance took nearly 13 minutes to arrive — five minutes longer than the industry standard — but a fire engine with EMTs arrived within that time frame. Once Bauer was in the ambulance, it took another 14 minutes to get him to a hospital.

Just minutes after the shooting, IRS agents declined an offer from other federal agents to load Bauer into an SUV and drive him themselves, which Lamm said would have saved nearly 20 minutes. 

Lamm recalled the testimony of Kenji Inaba, an emergency medical surgeon based in Los Angeles, who testified that Bauer would have survived had he arrived at the emergency room 15 to 20 minutes earlier than he did. Lamm claimed that no government witnesses rebutted that assertion, but Horn did so in his testimony a day prior when he said Bauer likely would have died regardless.

Lamm said the chaos and confusion following the event constituted an independent and superseding cause of Bauer's death. But Ryan said one event still led to another.

“Why did all this chaos and confusion start?” she asked. “The defendant mishandled his firearm.”

Brown didn’t speak to reporters after the verdict. 

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