6-year sentence given in 2015 NAU shooting
FLAGSTAFF — More than four years after a deadly shooting rocked the Northern Arizona University campus, the former student charged with killing one student and seriously injuring three others was sentenced to six years in prison on Tuesday.
Steven Jones, 23, faced up to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of manslaughter and three counts of aggravated assault last month.
Before being sentenced, Jones addressed the victims and their relatives in the courtroom.
“If it were possible I would in a heartbeat right now trade places with Colin Brough,” Jones said. “If he could be home with his family and I could be dead, I would do that. But that’s not possible.”
The victims and their families asked Coconino County Superior Court Judge Dan Slayton at the hearing on Tuesday to impose the maximum sentence allowed under the plea.
Instead, Slayton sentenced Jones to six years for the manslaughter charge and five years for the aggravated assault charges and allowed the sentences to run concurrently, meaning Jones will serve no more than six years in prison.
The prosecution showed a 17-minute slideshow of the life of Colin Brough, the 20-year-old NAU student who was fatally shot. The photos showed him as a child, dressed as Batman for Halloween, and grinning with his face covered in cake batter. Family and friends wept as the slideshow played.
His mother, Claudia Brough, described for the judge the devastating impact the tragedy had on her family. She said she had two nervous breakdowns, suffered from depression and finally tried to take her life.
“When I lost him, I lost myself,” she said, breaking down in tears.
She said she will never be whole again, “just pasted and glued back together again.”
Kyle Zientek was shot twice in the back, and lost a kidney as a result. He had a punctured lung and severely damaged liver. He told the judge he is reminded of his injuries each time he looks in the mirror and sees the scars.
While some of the injuries have healed, the emotional pain is a much heavier burden, he said.
“We are lucky there weren’t any more innocent bystanders hurt,” he told the judge.
Under the plea deal, Jones faced at least five years but no more than 10 years in prison. He originally faced firstdegree murder charges that would have meant a minimum of 25 years in prison if he were found guilty.
Jones must serve at least 85 percent of the sentence time and will get 212 days of credit for time he served in jail already.
Prosecutors encountered obstacles when a jury in the first trial was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on whether Jones attacked the other students or acted in self-defense. A second trial was scheduled to begin last month with Jones facing a reduced charge of second-degree murder. But he decided to accept a plea bargain before the trial could begin.
Brough, a 20-year-old NAU student, was fatally shot in the melee that started outside an off-campus apartment complex and spilled onto campus on the evening of Oct. 8, 2015. Fellow students
“When I lost him, I lost myself.” Claudia Brough
Mother of fatal-shooting victim Colin Brough
Nick Piring, Nick Prato and Kyle Zientek, all 20 years old, were wounded.
Families ask for maximum sentence
Prosecutors asked the judge to impose 10 years, the maximum sentence allowed under the plea. They say Brough’s death has been an “unfathomable” loss to his family. In a letter to the court, his aunt, Andrea Jernegan, described a boy growing up who was full of light, laughter, joy and kindness. He liked to run on his tippy-toes and would call out “Aunt Gigi” and run to her when he saw her.
He had a smile that was so contagious that it brightened people’s days, she wrote.
She added Jones is getting off “way too easy” for the crimes he has committed, and she asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence.
“This sentence will not bring Colin back,” she wrote. “But it may allow some of us to have closure.”
Families of the three surviving victims asked the judge for the maximum sentence.
Piring was shot in the right arm and hip. Prosecutors showed a dramatic 5minute video of him right after the shooting, on the ground screaming. He struggles to tell a paramedic what happened.
“These other guys were angry at us and … I don’t know he pulled a gun and shot us.”
Prato was shot through the neck and needed surgery to try to repair nerves. His family said in letters to the court that he has suffered shooting pain, headaches and numbness. Medical tests show he has permanent nerve damage and loss of feeling.
There were tense moments in the courtroom on Tuesday.
Jones’ family sat on one side of the gallery, the victims and their families on the other.
After a lunch break, the judged warned the courtroom that he was made aware of “disrespectful comments that are being made from one party to another.” He didn’t say what the comments were, but said he would not hesitate to close the courtroom. He told people in the gallery to behave themselves in a respectful manner and if they couldn’t control themselves, “I’m strongly urging you to use your two feet to leave now rather than having handcuffs assist you.”
Jones’ family responds, asks for leniency
Jones has no prior felony convictions, and a presentencing report prepared by the county’s Adult Probation Department said he has “performed flawlessly” while out of custody and on electronic monitoring. The report concluded that “mitigation appears to outweigh aggravation in this case.”
The report said that “any sentence imposed in this case does not reverse the devastating outcomes all involved parties have suffered thus far.”
In letters to the court, friends and family describe Jones as a man raised with traditional Christian values with a father who served in the U.S. Navy and a mother in the U.S. Air Force.
They say he is naturally generous,
giving up his room to sleep on the couch when his aunts came to visit and handing his leftover tokens to another boy one day on the way out of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.
He was motivated and self-disciplined to lose more than a hundred pounds between 2011 and 2012 and has since become a mentor to others at his gym.
He enrolled at NAU “full of hopes and dreams” in fall 2015 and aspired to an engineering degree, his parents, Warren and Rose Jones, wrote to the court. They asked the judge to impose a lenient sentence in their letter to the court, saying they feel their son has been imprisoned since the horrible event occurred.
Jones’ attorneys played a video taken after the shooting of him sobbing with his heads in his hands. When told by police that one of the students had died, he crouches on the floor in a fetal position, weeping. “I wish someone had shot me,” he said, and “I should have just let them kill me.”
What happened that night?
Jones, an NAU freshman from Glendale at the time of the shooting, said he shot in self-defense. But prosecutors say he was the aggressor.
The tragedy made national news and was later the subject of an hourlong ABC “20/20” television special. It marked the first time a shooting had ever happened on the Flagstaff campus.
Lou Diesel, a Flagstaff attorney who represents three of the four victims’ families but is not involved in the criminal proceedings, spoke in court on Tuesday about the impact the shooting had on the community.
“We don’t have mass shootings in Flagstaff. We don’t have mass shootings in our universities … This doesn’t happen here.”
The first trial was filled with conflicting accounts of what happened on the evening of the shooting.
Jones and his two friends described being set upon by a mob of mostly drunken and angry fraternity brothers. The fraternity brothers denied there was any violence on their part after the first sucker punch, but Jones’ friends described being taken to the ground.
Jones claimed his life was in danger and that he fired on Brough and Piring because they were about to tackle him. But prosecutors say Jones was never in danger for his life, and that he returned to the fight with premeditation — and a gun.
Though Piring and some of the other fraternity brothers testified that Jones and Brough were several feet apart, the autopsy report introduced as evidence in the first trial showed that Brough was 2 feet or closer to the muzzle of Jones’ gun when he fired. The trajectory of the bullets indicated that Brough was leaning forward as if lunging, as some witnesses said.
The prosecution suggested that Brough tripped and fell.
Both sides quibbled over the number of people who jumped Jones after the first shooting.
Several witnesses described trying to subdue Jones and take away his gun. Jones said he was certain that if they took the gun, they would shoot him and kill him. He said he fired into the air, striking Prato and Zientek. The prosecution alleged that Jones intended to shoot them.
Had the retrial gone forward, it was expected to last about five weeks with the defense and prosecution potentially calling as many as 90 witnesses and experts to the stand.
So much time has passed that many witnesses to the shooting and all three survivors are no longer NAU students. Piring and Zientek graduated with finance degrees. Prato earned a degree in hotel and restaurant management.
Diesel, the attorney for three of the four victims, told the judge on Tuesday that all three victims have very good jobs.
“The defendant tried to kill them,” Diesel said. “But he didn’t kill their spirit.”