A man charged with the murder of a high school student told a Barrow County deputy he was defending his family when he fired.
A crowd had gathered Friday night in Winder as a man, later identified as Roberto Arellano, held pressure on a gunshot wound in Jose Tovar’s stomach, according to an incident report obtained Monday from the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office. Tovar was lying at the end of a driveway on Rooks Road with blood on his shirt and vomit on his face when Deputy Brandon Suggs arrived.
An ambulance took Tovar to Athens Regional Medical Center, where the East Jackson Comprehensive High School senior died during surgery.
Suggs cleared the crowd and asked, “Who had the gun?”
At first, no one answered.
Then, someone gestured toward 45-year-old Arellano.
“Roberto led me up the driveway in front of the house and pointed to a brown bench,” Suggs wrote in the report. “I noticed the rifle lying on the bench with a magazine and a .223 caliber bullet lying next to it. The rifle was a Sturm Ruger.”
Arellano said he was defending his son, whom Tovar and two others threatened to beat up.
The father told the deputy he didn’t know if Tovar and his friends had any weapons, but he admitted he fired a shot and struck Tovar, Suggs wrote.
The other two males who were with Tovar ran toward Pendergrass Road after the shooting, the report stated.
Arellano’s son, Eddie Villa, told Suggs that Tovar and the two other juveniles showed up and as he was working on his truck.
“Eddie said they called his juvenile brother out into the road, so that they could fight him,” Suggs wrote. “Eddie said they began to fight when his father, Roberto, shot Jose, who had jumped out at him.”
Emilia Villa, Arellano’s daughter, told Suggs she heard a commotion and her father grabbed his rifle because he thought the teens had weapons.
The unnamed, younger son of Arellano made a statement, saying the guys came to their house to fight his brother.
“My dad came out with a rifle and shot the guy and the other two guys went running up the street,” the juvenile son wrote in his statement. “Then we put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding.”
Arellano was charged with murder, simple assault, pointing or aiming a gun or pistol at another, discharge of a weapon on or near a public highway or street and aggravated assault. He was in the Barrow County jail on Monday.
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