By Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — San Bernardino, Calif., police Monday announced the arrest of a suspect in the shooting of a 22-year-old soldier on leave for the holidays.
Police arrested Ruben Ray Jurado in the Dec. 23 shooting of Army veteran Christopher Sullivan, a police spokeswoman said. Sullivan, who had served in Afghanistan, was attending a welcome home party in his honor when he intervened in a dispute between his brother and another man at the party over football.
According to authorities, the other man pulled a gun from his waistband and fired at least three shots, one hitting Sullivan in the neck, another in the buttocks.
Jurado, accompanied by an attorney, turned himself in about 2 p.m. Monday at a San Bernardino County sheriff’s substation in Chino Hills, authorities said.
Sullivan had survived an attack last December, when his unit was hit by a suicide bomber in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Six men were killed in the explosion, but Sullivan survived. The 22-year-old spent much of the last year recovering at Fort Campbell, Ky., his family said.
His mother, Suzanne Sullivan, told the Los Angeles Times that doctors believe her son will be paralyzed from the neck down.
“I don’t have any emotions. My emotions are none,” she said. “He didn’t deserve it. He’s an excellent son and an excellent man.”
Okay this case illustrates my point I’m trying to make on this precisely. Here we have a heinous, unnecessary crime that was perpetrated by a violent, ignorant individual. So why should this man upon conviction get to spend the next 10-25 years within a prison setting that allows him social interaction, a chance to educate himself, work, read, exercise, draw and paint etc., while his victim lays paralyzed from the neck down? Do you see now why I call for prison reform? Observer are you out there? Do you get it now?