Phillip Sailors is a retired Christian man, a sometime missionary who spent time serving the Lord in Latin America, and is well loved in his church.
He's also a killer, a man so worried that his Lilburn neighborhood was crime-ridden that when someone accidentally drove up to his home, his default reaction was to grab his revolver and shoot blindly into a car filled with terrified young people.
Sailors, 71, this month walked away with a misdemeanor plea deal, a $500 fine and a guilty conscience that will, his attorney says, haunt him to the grave. Still, that's not a bad deal for someone who put someone 50 years his junior into a grave.
Sailors is a man who faced murder charges and, police say, showed little remorse after he followed a fleeing car down his driveway and shot a college student in the head.
In fact, Sailors fired his first shot, a warning salvo, as the driver, 22-year-old Rodrigo Diaz, rolled down his window to apologize. The young man and his three teen-aged friends were lost the night of Jan. 26, 2013. They were on their way to pick up a friend to go skating. Their GPS wrongly put them in Sailors’ driveway instead of their destination, which was a home across the street.
The young man’s death lays bare how irrational fear overtakes reasonable caution, how communities get caught up in paranoia that tells them they are under siege by criminals, even though the crime rate in the U.S. has steadily declined for decades.
After firing a .22-caliber bullet into Diaz’s brain, Sailors justified his fears to investigators, saying there had been a rash of recent burglaries and he worried the teens in his driveway were breaking into one of his cars — or worse.
Mike Puglise, Sailors’ lawyer, said the home next to his client had been broken into.
“He wants the community to know he acted out of fear; he let his fears get away from him,” said Puglise, who once was a Lilburn cop. “Gwinnett has changed so much. We are hearing about horrible things on the news and we think the worst. Mr. Sailors wishes he could take that bullet back.”
Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, the prosecutor who cut the deal, discounted Sailors’ fears as unwarranted.
“There’s no evidence of break-ins,” said Porter. “That was a neighborhood rumor. There’s a fear that goes through these neighborhoods.”
Porter and Puglise do agree on one thing: “It was one horrible mistake after another,” Porter said.
The first mistake was technological — Diaz’s GPS brought him to Sailors’ home. As they sat in the driveway in Diaz’s 1994 Mitsubishi 3000GT, his girlfriend, Angie Rebolledo, called three times in two minutes trying to reach the friend they were picking up.
Inside the house, which sits isolated on a small hill, Sailors was with his wife, reading religious fare on his Kindle.
Sailors heard a noise and went outside to investigate. He saw headlights and, he said, two figures running from his two parked vehicles. He went inside to get his revolver, returned outside and fired a shot in the air. He said the the car revved up and drove towards him. He said he started running away, reached back and fired a shot.
“I shot him. He tried to steal my car so I shot him,” an officer quoted him saying.
Another officer arrived to hear a “chilling scream.” It was Angie, covered with her boyfriend’s blood.
“I didn’t do anything bad,” the shattered teen told Sailors after the shooting as they stood on his lawn. She told police he responded, “Why are you at my home?”
Lilburn police put two of the surviving teens in holding cells at the station, and a third in a booking room, apparently believing they were a robbing crew. One was a sobbing 17-year-old girl, and the youngest passenger was a bewildered, 120-pound, 15-year-boy. All three are Latino. Police called around to other Gwinnett departments looking for a Spanish-speaking officer on duty to translate but could not find one. They did not know the girl spoke pretty good English.
The elderly gunman was not locked up. Instead, he was brought to an interview room, where his family gave him the Sunday paper and $7 for vending machine snacks. Sailors alternated between being nonchalant and aggravated for being kept at the station, police said.
On the way there, he told a cop he was surprised that the Atlanta Hawks had been able to overcome a 27-point deficit and beat the Boston Celtics.
Later, he became upset because the cops wouldn’t tell him “why the kids were in his yard,” an officer noted. Still later, “he was aggravated he was still at the station and had already read everything at the station.”
His attorney says he was simply in shock, overcome by grief.
As Lilburn cops investigated, it started sinking in that the kids, not the longtime resident, might be telling the truth.
They looked for burglary tools in the car but found roller blades. They noticed the teens were well-dressed, not clothed in casual burglar garb.
The three survivors’ stories, and the physical evidence, indicated that Diaz was frantically trying to drive away from the gun-wielding homeowner, not towards him. And, the kids insisted, they never got out of the car.
“Sailors said he was scared that someone was trying to rob him,” one investigator later wrote. “Why did he go outside two times?”
By dawn, Diaz was dead and Sailors faced murder charges.
But this month, the murder charges dissipated into a count of misdemeanor involuntary manslaughter. The plea agreement said Sailors caused the death of “a human being, without any intention to do so, by commission of a lawful act in an unlawful manner.”
Following a fleeing car and firing a shot at a terrified driver who accidentally drove onto someone’s property is lawful?
Porter, who is known for sending vans full of convicted criminals to state institutions, said Diaz's family was the impetus for the creative sentencing solution.
The family had recently settled a negligent death lawsuit with Sailors for an undisclosed amount and are vastly forgiving people who want the tragedy thing behind them. Besides, one brother told a TV station, what good would it do to put an old guy in prison. It wouldn’t bring back his dead brother.
Porter said he probably could have convicted Sailors on murder charges, noting it was clear homeowner’s story didn’t match the facts.
This was not a case of self-defense, the prosecutor said. “This had nothing to do with Stand Your Ground laws. I’m not a huge fan of firearms for home defense.”
Too many people have no clue of what they are doing when it comes to firearms, Porter said.
But, Porter added, “I didn’t see any public safety reason for sending a 70-year-old man with no record to prison for the rest of his life.”
He doesn’t believe this sentence will be a clarion call to frightened homeowners or nuts with guns to come out blazing. Besides he doesn’t use convictions to send messages. He said he goes case by case and lets the body of his work speak.
Ultimately, said Porter, “I answer to crime victims, although I acknowledge that it is not their final decision” to prosecute or be merciful.
He said Sailors will not get his gun back, although there is nothing in the future to keep him from re-arming himself.
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