Brother says he shot at bar patrons

PALMER — Police say he wasn’t the shooter, but Donald Lee says he was. His brother’s fate rests on who the jury believes.

Lee, 23, was arrested April 7, after which he readily told police he’d emptied his revolver into cars in the parking lot of Tailgaters after an exchange of words with some soldiers in the bar. Later, when those soldiers told attorneys in the case that the shooter wasn’t Lee, but was his brother, Duane Aylsworth, 34, who was also at the bar that night, prosecutors dropped the most serious of the charges against Lee.

Lee eventually pleaded guilty to the remaining charges of hindering prosecution and eluding arrest and received a one-year prison sentence. Now Aylsworth stands accused of attempted murder for the shooting. Monday, Lee testified at his brother’s trial.

From the witness stand, he stuck to the same story he told police back in April. He said he, the soldiers and his brother had had a brief exchange of words, but he and Aylsworth were leaving anyway. He said he wasn’t mad, until the soldiers tried to follow him out of the bar.

The soldiers, for their part, said they were just walking the brothers out of the bar, that Aylsworth was being rude to a friend of theirs and that they’d asked him to leave after a brief exchange of tough-talk.

“We went back to the house. We went and got fuel. And then I started thinking about it and I got madder and madder and madder,” Lee testified. “I decided to come back and scare them.”

So Lee said he pulled up to the bar, drove around to the side and parked. When the soldiers came out he shot at them. Then he fired along a taxi van in the parking lot behind which the soldiers had taken cover. He said he moved his shots toward the back of the van to avoid actually hitting them.

“I didn’t think they would make it back that far,” Lee said.

And why did Lee get so angry? Jarom Bangerter, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, asked him about statements he’d made that it was the anti-smoking drug Chantix that drove him to it. Lee said it probably was. The drug made him irritable.

“It didn’t make me do it, but it made me angry enough to do it,” he said.

“You lost control over an anti-smoking drug?” Bangerter asked.

“Yes,” Lee replied.

Bangerter used other questions to draw out inconsistencies between Lee’s statements and his brother’s. For instance, where did the guns come from? Were they in the car the whole time, as Lee said, or did they have to go back home and get them?

Lee said he always carries his revolver with him — as he put it he’s “very paranoid.” That night was no different. He also happened to have his dad’s semi-automatic pistol in the car. But Aylsworth said in statements to the police that they went home to get the guns.

“So you’re telling the truth and he’s not?” Bangerter asked.

“He was mistaken,” Lee responded.

And then there’s the question of the hat. Who was wearing the hat? In previous days of trial, one of the soldiers fired upon said the shooter was wearing the same hat Aylsworth was wearing that night.

But Lee said he wasn’t wearing a hat when he shot up the parking lot. He said his brother was. But, Bangerter pointed out, the hat wound up in a bag with the rest of Lee’s clothes when he was arrested and his belongings were seized as evidence. So, the attorney asked, how did Lee wind up with the hat?

Lee said he found it in the back of a police car while he was being questioned.

Bangerter asked Lee if he’d be surprised to hear that his brother’s DNA wound up on the banana everyone agrees the shooter was wearing. Lee said he wouldn’t. They share clothes all the time and lived together back in April.

And why, when the shooting happened, was the passenger side door open if Lee had been driving?

Lee said his brother was outside yelling for him to stop shooting. Bangerter seemed incredulous. Neither of the soldiers fired upon testified to hearing anyone yell at the shooter.

“Was it loud enough for other people to hear?” he asked.

“I heard it,” Lee answered.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.