Man Convicted Of Racially Charged Murder Of Latino Neighbor

Gary Thomas Kelley, 51, of Phoenix, Arizona was sentenced to 20 years in prison after shooting his neighbor Juan Varela in the neck after telling him to “go back to Mexico” in the heated post-SB 1070 environment. This goes back to something we’ve harped on often here at News Taco: these supposed “anti-immigrant” bills are actually anti-Latino bills and enable violence and harassment of all Latinos.

The two had been neighbors for eight years, at first, investigators wanted to call this a drunken dispute. Unfortunately, the facts intervened:

Varela had been watering a tree in his front yard on May 6, 2010, when Kelley confronted him, pointed a snub-nosed revolver in Varela’s face and fatally wounded him with a single shot to the neck, Phoenix police said.

Investigators said Kelley, who was arrested immediately after the shooting, repeated a racial slur several times and told Varela to “go back to Mexico” or he would die.

Now that Kelley is facing time, he told the family he’s neither a racist, nor does he hate Mexicans. I guess we can blame the beer? Of course I don’t have to tell you that Varela was a U.S. citizen, born here, so he had nowhere to go back to.

So, again, the point of SB 1070 and Georgia’s anti-immigrant laws, and those of every other state, is that it’s not about immigrants, it’s about all Latinos.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD