Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 21, 1993 TAG: 9309210107
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Was it self-defense or was it murder?
After hearing more than two hours of testimony and arguments Monday, Pulaski County General District Judge Ed Turner ruled there was enough evidence to send charges of murder and using a firearm to commit a crime to a grand jury. A grand jury will decide whether to indict Pagan to stand trial on these charges.
Walter Herman Pagan, 79, died during surgery July 14 in Pulaski Community Hospital. He was taken there after Stella Pagan reported she had shot her husband at their rural Caseknife Road home.
She told Pulaski County authorities she was afraid for her own life. Her husband had verbally and physically assaulted her that day, she told sheriff's deputies the day of the shooting.
Bob Ingram, Pagan's lawyer, said "no one grieved more" over Walter Pagan's death than his widow. But her actions became necessary when her husband "suddenly and frightfully went over the edge," Ingram said.
Ingram said the man was large and muscular for his age and, over a three-day period shortly after having minor surgery, became a "grotesque image of his former self" that in "no way resembled the husband she knew and loved."
Stella Pagan felt compelled to shoot her husband as he came toward her throwing porch chairs after earlier hitting her in the face and biting one of her fingers, Ingram said.
Doug Schroder, assistant commonwealth's attorney, told Turner a self-defense argument was questionable.
Schroder said several of the shots struck Walter Pagan in the back and that he was likely throwing the chairs to ward off his wife when he saw her standing at the screen door with a gun.
Sgt. Mike Alderman of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office testified that Stella Pagan told him she was in her bedroom when her husband walked in and assaulted her. She tried talking with him in the kitchen, but her husband was upset about being kept awake a few nights earlier by a visitor, Alderman said the woman told him.
Stella Pagan said she "couldn't take it anymore" and left to walk around the house. Her husband followed. She went back into the house, latching a screen door. Fearing that he was going to retrieve a gun from his truck to make good on an earlier threat to kill her, Stella Pagan got her .22-caliber pistol from under her mattress and returned to the front door where her husband was approaching, Alderman recounted.
"He was coming at me," she told Alderman. She said her husband threw a chair before she ever fired a shot.
Alderman testified the woman thought she shot her husband three times.
"I didn't want to kill him, I just wanted to keep him off of me," Alderman said Pagan told him during an interview.
Ray Pagan, one of the couple's nine living children, testified his father had become particularly verbally abusive toward his mother two days before he was shot. During a drive to a doctor's visit, Ray Pagan said, his father cursed and threatened his wife because he had been kept awake the night before by a visitor.
"I'll kill her if it's the last damn thing I'll do on this earth," Ray Pagan recalled his father saying.
Daughter Robin Breedlove testified her father had been extremely moody and subject to irrational outbursts during the three to four weeks she had lived with her parents before the shooting.
Breedlove said her father threatened to kill her mother the same way he had shot her dog.
"Daddy's always cussed Momma, but here lately it was different," Breedlove said.
Breedlove's son, Jason Roop, testified his grandmother told him the morning of the shooting that she was scared of her husband and didn't know what to do.
Schroder told the judge that threats and cursing alone never justified killing another person. And the assault had stopped when Stella Pagan got her gun, he said.
Mike Barbour, another Pulaski lawyer representing Pagan, argued that she feared her husband planned to make good that day on a threat to kill her. He had said he wanted "to have the same feeling as when he shot her dog's head off," Barbour said.
When Stella Pagan got her gun, she believed her husband had his gun and was coming after her.
Turner called the Pagan case "perhaps the most difficult case I've ever had to consider." He offered his sympathy to the children and grandchildren in the courtroom before ruling that a grand jury should consider the charges. His chief concern, Turner said, was that the husband's assault on his wife had stopped before the shooting occurred.
by CNB