A person could almost feel sorry for Kevin Monahan’s defense team. The attorneys are tasked with defending the indefensible, which explains why they are grasping at straws.
It was the gun’s fault, you see. The darn thing wasn’t working properly.
So far in the Washington County trial, that’s the best explanation we’ve heard for why 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot when she and some friends got lost in rural Hebron and turned up the wrong driveway in the dark of an April night. A passenger in her boyfriend’s car, Gillis was hit in the neck and died shortly after.
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“This was a terrible accident,” Arthur Frost, who is representing Monahan with attorney Kurt Mausert, said in his opening statement last week. “Somebody should have realized that by now.”
Frost contends that Monahan owned a shotgun prone to firing without the trigger being pulled. It isn’t clear if Monahan knew the weapon was faulty, but he kept the weapon next to his bed, according to court testimony. Somehow, the faulty weapon never blew up the family TV or blasted a hole into the refrigerator.
Frost claimed that Monahan, convinced that Gillis and her friends were an “invasion” of menacing bikers arriving at 10 p.m. to do God-knows-what, grabbed the weapon, walked out onto his wraparound deck in his flip-flops, fired one warning shot and then stumbled over some loose nails — “bang the gun goes off,” Frost said.
“I’m going to ask you point blank: Did you pull that trigger?” Frost asked Monahan in subsequent testimony.
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“No, I did not,” Monahan replied, as reported by Times Union reporter Rob Gavin, who is covering the trial.
According to police, Monahan neglected to mention that he’d fired even once during a 911 call or when they arrived at the house later that night. Saying hunters could be to blame for gunshots in the area, Monahan didn’t use the opportunity to tell officers about the menacing bikers he’d frightened away. He told them it had been a quiet evening and he’d been asleep since 8:30 p.m.
Prosecutors allege that Monahan, 66, covered up the crime by removing DNA evidence from the shotgun, which, thankfully, didn’t let loose with another faulty shot. A firearms expert testified that the weapon was working properly when she tested the 20-gauge pump action shotgun. Frost may produce a countervailing expert of his own.
Monahan, by the way, is an old man. The ageism comes from Frost, who has repeatedly used the trial to cast Monahan as elderly, even though he’s 15 years younger than the president of the United States.
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Presumably, the description is about making Monahan seem weak and sympathetic. In contrast, Frost’s trial questions, directed at Gillis’ boyfriend, about marijuana and alcohol in his car are an attempt to make the group of friends seem less sympathetic. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t innocents, don’t you know. Maybe they were up to no good.
It’s a disgraceful and disgusting line of questioning, lacking in relevancy. The friends were heading to party, remember. The boyfriend’s sobriety has not been questioned, and it isn’t as though testimony from him or others in the group is key to the case.
Monahan concedes, after all, that he shot Gillis. The question is whether the act amounts to second-degree murder, punishable by at least 25 years in prison. “I took somebody else’s life,” Monahan said on the stand Friday, adding that the incident left him feeling like his soul is dead.
Monahan deserves this due process, of course. From my perspective, I am more than open to evidence suggesting that the killing was nothing more than a horrible accident, because it would be comforting, in a sense, if this wasn’t what it has long appeared to be: a senseless and unspeakable act of deliberate violence produced by a metastasizing culture of fear, paranoia and anger.
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It would be reassuring, in other words, to learn that Monahan didn’t intentionally fire at lost strangers, killing a young woman described by those who knew her as “such a sweet girl, with a kind heart and big smile.”
But Monahan said he felt under siege when the vehicles arrived in his driveway, and he concedes he didn’t call out to the strangers or bother to ascertain why they were there. Nothing he or Frost has said, at least so far, suggests that Monahan acted with anything less than a depraved indifference to human life.
The life of Kaylin Gillis, that is.
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