OFF THE WIRE
After a week of shifting witness testimony, the jury begins deliberations today on six felony charges facing Vagos motorcycle club member Patrick Ouellette in an alleged beating in Carson City last September.
Ouellette is accused of kidnapping Cody McChesney, 32, of Carson City, and beating him nearly to death before parading him around to drug dealers.
The jury's verdict could hinge on at least two key aspects. The first is whether McChesney and Heather Green were forced at gunpoint into Ouellette's car or whether they got in willingly. The second is whether, as Tara Schulz testified, Ouellette beat McChesney until he moaned “like somebody who was too exhausted to scream” as he lay in a pool of his own blood, or if that was a story of people hoping to cut deals on lesser charges and whose details of events all differed.
Ouellette is charged with first- and second-degree kidnapping with use of a dead ly weapon, battery and assault with a deadly weapon, extortion, all with gang enhancements, and battery by strangulation. Each gang enhancement carries a penalty of one to 20 years in prison on top of the base penalty for the crime. He could, in effect, go to prison for the rest of his life.
For the prosecution, Ouellette, 30, of Reno, is a man obsessed with control and who dived headlong from his job as an advanced-math teacher at Reno High School into the outlaw motorcycle lifestyle, ultimately flying into a rage at a meth addict, kidnapping him and severely beating him.
For the defense, Ouellette, president of the Carson City Vagos chapter for a short while, was a man who found camaraderie in a maligned motorcycle club with questionable choices in friends who defended himself when an incensed McChesney sucker-punched him over another person's debt while Ouellette drove.
Neither side denies that McChesney's head was cut or that the dispute stemmed from McChesney's loaning $200 to Schulz, a friend of Ouellette's, so that she could buy drugs.
Jesse Kalter, Ouellette's defense attorney, hit on the backgrounds of the main primary witnesses in his closing argument Thursday: McChesney and Heather Green each have felony convictions stemming from passing bad checks; Harlan Hendry, who testified to being an accomplice in the abduction and beating, admitted to being a methamphetamine user and that he received immunity in exchange for his testimony, though he was never charged for them; and Schulz pleaded guilty recently to trafficking methamphetamine and stands a chance at probation for a crime that is normally mandatory prison.
“When she gets in trouble, she'll say anything ... to avoid prison time and being separated from her children,” Kalter told the jury.
Prosecuting attorney Gerald Gardner said his witnesses stand to gain little for their testimony, and certainly not enough to warrant making up a story about a president of a club the Department of Justice has dubbed an outlaw motorcycle gxxg and local gang police have testified to multiple acts of violence in the Reno area.
He said he didn't want to sugar-coat their sordid pasts, that they lived in a “sad underworld of transience, drug abuse and fear.”
“The crimes committed in hell are seldom witnessed by angels,” Gardner said.
He argued, further, that Carson City's underworld is one Ouellette, who is married with a young son and a home in northern Reno, chose to enter in the hopes of controlling it and running it like the iconic motorcycle gxxgs of popular culture.
“He wanted to be lord of this underworld and he wanted to victimize them,” Gardner said.
http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20120720/NEWS/120729998/1070&ParentProfile=1058
