After a Phoenix girl shot her husband, she sat down to observe him slowly die whereas she smoked a cigarette. Solely then did she name 911. She claimed she discovered him “injured” when first responders arrived, however that was an enormous mistake.
Rebekah Mellon claimed she had an abusive childhood in Oklahoma and escaped state custody on the age of 18. To make ends meet, she grew to become a stripper, and after a short marriage, she relocated to Phoenix, the place she met Donald Mellon, whom she would later marry.
Donald Mellon hailed from a rich household that owned McDonald’s eating places in Phoenix’s western suburbs. An worker on the strip membership the place Rebekah labored advised Donald he ought to meet her since she was “proper off the bus from Nebraska.” Donald was ten years Rebekah’s senior.
The pair had been married for seven years when Rebekah entered the lounge of her central Phoenix house armed with a handgun. Her partner was on the sofa, speaking on the telephone. She raised the gun, took purpose, and fired the gun. As he lay dying on the sofa, she sat down and lit a cigarette. Lastly, 23 minutes later, she contacted 911 to report the taking pictures.
Rebekah advised the police that she got here out of her bed room to see her husband injured, in accordance with experiences. Her tales, although, stored altering. The gun, the alleged homicide weapon, was found between the cushions of the sofa the place she had sat, in accordance with investigators. Rebekah was arrested as soon as police found her huge mistake.
In keeping with AZ Central, Rebekah Mellon was unaware that your entire altercation was recorded on the couple’s house digital camera system. The video exhibits Rebekah sitting on the L-shaped sofa, smoking a cigarette after she shot Donald Mellon. It additionally exhibits a bloodied Donald crawling into the image and pushing himself off the ground and onto the sofa.
Donald would have survived the accidents if medical professionals had arrived sooner. Previous to studying concerning the surveillance video, Rebekah’s protection group deliberate to plead responsible to manslaughter expenses, which might have resulted in a sentence of seven to 10 years. The police wouldn’t should work too laborious to find out the main points of the homicide. Not who did it, however why did it occur, was the query.
The protection group for Rebekah Mellon employed psychologists to look at her life. She stated she had been abused by her husband for years, and the protection meant to make use of it because the trigger for her crime. In a memorandum filed with the court docket, her legal professional, Jennifer Willmott, said that if the matter had gone to trial, she would have argued that Rebekah acted in self-defense.
Willmott said that Rebekah Mellon was in a state of concern for her life because of the bodily violence she allegedly endured by the hands of Donald. Nevertheless, the trial would have included a presentation of the footage of the taking pictures and its aftermath.
After seeing the house surveillance video, Maricopa County Supreme Court docket Choose Pamela Gates suggested Rebekah Mellon to take a plea deal. Choose Gates said that jurors who sympathized with the Phoenix girl as a sufferer of home violence—a few of which was additionally captured on safety footage—would additionally watch her “sit in the identical room with somebody and patiently let him die.”
Rebekah determined that taking the plea discount was in her greatest pursuits. She was sentenced to twenty years in jail. Spousal abuse is actual, and nobody is saying Rebekah Mellon was not a sufferer. Nevertheless, she crossed the road when she changed into a perpetrator of unimaginable violence by changing into her husband’s sole choose, jury, and executioner.
