A Stillwater bail agent who claimed she shot a client in self defense has been arrested for his murder.
Just before noon on Wednesday last week, Chasity Dawn Carey, 41, of Signature Bail Bonds, called police to report that she shot and killed a man in her office.
Carey told investigators that she had called the man, identified as Brandon James Williams, 38, of Stillwater, to her office with the intention of revoking his $35,000 bond and taking him into custody. Williams was charged with three counts of burglary and one count of unlawful possession of marijuana. He was advised at court on August 2 that he must appear with counsel at his next court date, or bond would be revoked.
When she advised him that she was revoking his bond and taking him back to the Payne County Sheriff's Office, Carey says, a fight broke out. The bond agent told investigators that she reached into her desk for a gun and shot Williams in self defense.
However, police say evidence at the scene, including video evidence and witness testimony, contradict Carey's story. Investigators say Williams was shot in the back, which does not appear to indicate a "justifiable act of self-defense."
Payne County Special District Judge Katherine Thomas ordered that the defendant be held without bond until her next court date, scheduled for August 16.
Oklahoma has fairly permissive self defense laws, promoting both the Castle Doctrine, in which a person has the right to use lethal force against an intruder in his or her home, and Stand Your Ground, in which a person has no duty to retreat from any threat in any place he or she has a lawful right to be.
However, lethal force is only to be used in the prevention of great bodily harm; it is not to be utilized in the protection of property, nor it is to be utilized once the threat of harm has been neutralized.
In Tulsa, a man has been charged with manslaughter in the shooting of a 15-year-old boy who was burglarizing the man's father's fireworks stand on the Fourth of July. Johnny Mize, Jr., witnessed the teen and his adult cousin loading $600 worth of fireworks into their pickup, and jumped into the truck as the two attempted to flee. Mize says that he shot at the pair after they fired at him; Jack Ulrich, the other suspect in the robbery, says that neither he nor his young cousin was armed.
Prosecutors accuse Mize of overreacting, and they say the shooting was unjustified as they found no evidence of an armed robbery.
