Verdict mixed in shooting case

Defendant Snowden acquitted on more serious charge in assault of 8-year-old boy

WEST CHESTER » A Chester County Common Pleas jury on Thursday found a North Coventry man guilty of simple assault and recklessly endangering another person for shooting an 8-year-old boy in the thigh as he stood with his bicycle after racing a friend on a spring afternoon.

But the panel of eight men and four women, who deliberated just under two hours before returning with their verdict, acquitted Wayne Jeffery Snowden of the most serious charge against him, felony aggravated assault.

The verdict was a victory for the defense, which had argued that Snowden had fired the shot that struck the young boy mistakenly after fumbling with the loaded gun on the porch outside his home. The defense acknowledged that he was guilty of simple assault because of Snowden’s negligence in handling the weapon.

“He’s a good and decent man,” said defense attorney Andrew Thomson of Philadelphia of his client. “He made a mistake. Who among us hadn’t made one?”

Snowden, 56, who took the stand in his own defense during the four-day long trial, will be sentenced by Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft in the future. He remains free on bail.

The jury’s decision meant they accepted Thomson’s suggestion that the case came down to negligence but not felony assault, as the prosecution had contended.

Thomson had conceded that it was Snowden who was holding the gun when it went off, but maintained that he did not mean

to fire it. Authorities, however, contended that independent witness testimony showed that Snowden had, in fact, leveled the gun and fired it from his front porch to illustrate his anger toward an employee of his house cleaning company — an act of recklessness.

In his summation to the panel, Assistant District Attorney Max O’Keefe, the lead prosecutor on the case, stressed that the way Snowden had used the 9 mm Glock semi-automatic the day of the shooting was dangerous and put those children playing in the neighborhood at risk, including the victim, A.J. Hagner.

“Guns are used to kill people,” O’Keefe said in his closing. “That is what they are for. But because of their inherent danger people who use them should do so with caution and respect. The defendant, instead, was using it as an exclamation point so he could come off as a tough guy in front of his friends.”

O’Keefe argued that the prosecution’s case came down to whether you believed its primary witness — an employee of Snowden’s cleaning company who heard the shot fired and saw Snowden standing outside on his porch with his arm raised and pointed toward where the victim was standing. He said the employee, Donta Singleton, had no reason to lie.

Si n g le t on testif ied that the shot came after Snowden made a threatening remark about another employee with whom he was having a dispute.

“The Commonwealth isn’t saying the defendant was trying to shoot … another person,” O’Keefe said. “What we are saying is that he was so reckless on that day that it is a crime. This was not an accident. It required a conscious act to pull that trigger.”

O’Keefe said that the felony assault charge was warranted because by firing the gun into a residential neighborhood, Snowden had put people’s lives at risk. “It is criminal when you are on a front porch in a neighborhood where you know there are kids,” he said. “That’s when it became reckless. This was not a freak accident. He was reckless.”

In his closing argument, Thomson suggested that the prosecution had not met its burden to prove his client guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on the charges of felony aggravated assault, but conceded that he should be convicted of a lesser misdemeanor, simple assault.

He said that authorities had not shown how the bullet went from the porch on South Hanover Street to the location on West Main Street where the victim was standing with a friend after racing their bikes.

Thomson acknowledged in his closing that Snowden — by lying to police about not knowing who fired the shot that hit Hagner and by fumbling with the gun without knowing whether it was loaded — had acted stupidly.

“But I am not saying that it was a bad act by Mr. Snowden,” the defense attorney said. “I am saying it is a bad thing that a child was shot. It is headline grabbing. He’s a good and decent man, and he made a mistake. Who among us hadn’t made one?

“Does that change how the gun went off? No. There is no conclusive evidence you can say that Wayne’s actions were reckless that day. The gun went off negligently, not recklessly.”

In his testimony on the stand Wednesday, Snowden said that he was outside on his front porch when the gun went off. He had put it in the pocket of a bathrobe he was wearing when it became tangled with a set of keys he needed to give to employees to move various trucks at his home.

He said that when he pulled the keys and gun out of the robe, one of the keys became stuck in the trigger guard. When he pulled the key out, the gun went off.

On direct examination, he told Thomson that the gun was pointed upwards when it fired. But on cross-examination, he told O’Keefe that the weapon was pointing downward when it went off.

Singleton, to the contrary, said he was inside the house listening to Snowden spout off about the employee he was arguing with when he heard the “pop” of a gunshot. When he looked out the door at Snowden, he saw his arm raised. Snowden then walked back in the house and put the gun back in his bathrobe pocket, Singleton testified.

The shooting occurred at 4:45 p.m. on Friday, May 9, on West Main Street in the South Pottstown section of North Coventry.

Hagner, the young victim, had been riding his bicycle with a friend, racing one another up and down West Main. He was standing on the sidewalk about 80 feet from Snowden’s porch when he was struck by a single bullet in the upper left thigh. O’Keefe said Hagner tried to run home, but an alert witness who was walking his daughter to a nearby dance studio told him to lie down and got others to call 911 for emergency help.

Hagner was flown by helicopter to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where emergency medical staff determined that the bullet had narrowly missed his femoral artery, which if struck could have been fatal. He lost considerable blood, but was released from the hospital the following day. He still carries a scar from the incident.

Wayne Jeffery Snowden