MARTINEZ — A person who took 1000’s of gun elements, equipment and bullets from a Contra Costa Sheriff’s gun vary whereas volunteering for the company has been convicted of three gun costs in a plea deal.
John Michael King pleaded no contest to 2 misdemeanor counts and one felony cost, associated to possession of an assault weapon and gun elements. He was sentenced to 90 days of home arrest, a two-year probation time period and ordered by the courtroom to not possess firearms, which his felony conviction additionally bars, courtroom data present.
The case filed in 2022 was litigated for two-and-a-half years till prosecutors and protection attorneys finalized a decision final December. The result has not been beforehand reported.
King’s lawyer didn’t reply to a request for remark. Requested for a remark, a Contra Costa District Legal professional’s spokesman merely recited the phrases of the plea deal.
King, a volunteer with the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Workplace, was allowed to take 1000’s of gun elements and ammunition from the sheriff’s gun vary on Marsh Creek Street in unincorporated Clayton for “well over a decade,” in line with a retired lieutenant’s testimony. The observe was modified after an inside probe, which additionally discovered no criminality and produced no written findings, in line with the testimony.
The gadgets had been marked for destruction, and included bullets and gun elements that had been seized throughout prison investigations and ostensibly taken off the streets, courtroom data present.
However when the Contra Costa District Legal professional’s Workplace discovered what had occurred, it despatched a squad of investigators to King’s ex-wife’s house, the place a mom lode of reside bullets, gun elements, holsters and different equipment nonetheless remained within the storage. His ex-wife had despatched quite a few letters to sheriff’s staff, together with Sheriff David Livingston, expressing concern that the bullets posed a attainable security hazard.
The lieutenant who investigated the matter for the sheriff’s inside affairs division testified in 2020 that he seemed across the storage the place King’s weapons have been stashed and didn’t see something “overtly illegal.”
However allegedly unlawful assault weapons, in addition to the suspected ghost gun, have been discovered by DA inspectors who searched the identical storage two years later, courtroom data present.
