Va. Beach man guilty of manslaughter in death of teen

VIRGINIA BEACH

A man who accidentally shot his friend with a defective handgun and repeatedly blamed the killing on a drive-by shooter was convicted Wednesday of involuntary manslaughter.

Keith Samuel Rivera, 22, pleaded guilty to receiving a stolen weapon and twice making false reports to police. But he and his lawyers insisted the shooting didn't rise to the level of manslaughter.

Testimony in Circuit Court showed Rivera held a phone in one hand and a gun in the other at a kitchen table inside his mother's Ocean Lakes condo the night of Aug. 11, 2010. Seventeen-year-old Brandon Ashby sat next to him. Rivera toyed with the weapon as he talked with his girlfriend.

He thought the gun was unloaded, Rivera later told detectives. He pulled the trigger. Ashby collapsed to the floor, a bullet in his chest.

Rivera called 911. He breathlessly told the dispatcher he and Ashby had been walking on Bold Ruler Drive when someone in a white car pulled up alongside and fired one shot. They ran back to Rivera's home, he said, and now Ashby was dying in front of him.

Rivera told the same story to Detectives Janine Hall and Raymond Pickell later that night.

But the facts did not add up from the beginning, prosecutor Scott Lang told the judge. There was no blood on the sidewalk where Rivera told police Ashby had been shot, no trail leading to the condo.

Then there was the grainy footage captured on a pair of surveillance cameras near the condo where Ashby died. A man with a cellphone to his ear runs between a cut-through - toward the place where a neighbor later found two guns stashed beneath shrubs. The man disappears from the frame, then reappears, headed in the other direction, the phone still pressed to his ear.

One of those guns was the weapon that killed Ashby, an expert determined.

A week after the death, Hall and Pickell reinterviewed Rivera. In a video played during Rivera's day-and-a-half-long trial, the detectives asked him again what had happened. Rivera repeated the story of the white car and drive-by shooter.

Hall and Pickell prodded. Now's the time to tell all, they said. Rivera insisted he'd told them everything. Then the detectives showed him stills from the surveillance video.

Rivera changed his story: Ashby accidentally shot himself, then instructed Rivera to hide the guns.

"Everything you just told me is a lie," Pickell responded.

Forensic evidence showed Ashby did not fire the gun, Hall told him. "Forensics don't lie."

Pickell placed Rivera under arrest and read him his rights. Rivera put his head on the table, shifted in his chair, hung his head. Minutes passed in silence.

Then, nearly two hours into the interview, Rivera said: "We were both playing with it. He had cocked it back. I didn't realize it. He passed it back.... I accidentally pulled the trigger.... I don't know how in the hell I did this."

"It was a typical day that ended in a horrible tragedy," Tiffany Crawford, one of Rivera's public defenders, said in her opening statement. Rivera's lies "were conceived out of fear."

Experts for both sides testified the gun that killed Ashby was missing a barrel latch and would fire even with its safety on.

"He pulled the trigger," countered prosecutor Kari Kopnicky. "It was pointed at Brandon and it killed him."

Judge Patricia West agreed.

"The condition of the gun plays against your client," West said before finding him guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

"I know you lost your friend that night," the judge said. "You're going to have to live with that. You're also going to have to live with the consequences of the choices you made."

Rivera faces up to 17 years in prison when he is sentenced March 20.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5131, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com