Jury still out for man who pulled gun in bar

PALMER — A jury deciding the case Tyler Gardino is going to need at least another day to reach a verdict.

When court closed Monday, the jury of six men and six women were still asking questions of the attorneys and requesting to hear the recordings of certain testimony offered over the course of the three-day trial.

Gardino, 29, was arrested May 2 at the Del Rois bar at the tail end of a bar fight. He faces up to two years in prison and is charged with one count of felony assault and two of misdemeanor weapons misconduct.

Neither side in the case dispute that he brandished a 9-milimeter, semi-automatic pistol at the bar that night.

What Gardino’s attorney argues is that the incident didn’t rise to the level of an assault, that he pulled his gun in self-defense as four large men advanced on him.

Prosecutors, for their part, argue that Gardino could’ve left the bar instead of pulling out a gun.

In his closing arguments, Jon-Marc Petersen, representing Gardino, said that there was no time for his client to escape.

“He doesn’t have an opportunity to say, sorry guys, let me just be on my way,” Petersen said. “He’s there having a beer, playing pool and then, boom! this thing escalates.”

He said it was reasonable for Gardino to think he men were going to cause him physical injury because, as it turns out, they did. Gardino was punched until he was unconscious, Petersen said, then bound with duct tape and left on the barroom floor to wait for the cops.

During her rebuttals to Petersen’s arguments, Assistant District Attorney Trina Sears said the case wasn’t about how hurt Gardino got in the scuffle.

“It’s about Tyler Gardino’s choice, poor choice, illegal choice, to pull out a loaded firearm, rack a round into the chamber and put it into the chest,” of one of his fellow bar patrons.

In fact, she pointed out, once the gun came out the bar patrons would have been perfectly within their rights if they chose to use deadly force to subdue him.

She typified much of Gardino’s case as akin to saying, “poor me, they beat me up,” and pointed out that Gardino essentially pulled a gun having just been in a verbal dispute.

“You might not like the way you’re treated. You might not like what someone says to you,” Sears said. But, “You don’t get to pull out a gun. It’s not the Wild West.”

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