When bad aim earns a lighter sentence
An “Other Side” Essay
The phone rang, and it was him.
He was calling from the county jail, awaiting trial for shooting her ten times. Ten. Not a crime of passion that ended with a single pull of the trigger. Ten deliberate, conscious decisions to keep firing for over an hour. And somehow, impossibly, she survived.
He had a request.
“This is what you’re gonna say,” he told her. “You’re going to tell them you shot yourself.”
As ludicrous a request as it was, unbelievably, she actually considered doing it. Not because she was stupid or didn’t understand what he’d done to her. But because even after absorbing ten rounds from the “man” who claimed to love her, she was still terrified of him. It’s the kind of fear that doesn’t make sense to people who haven’t lived it. The kind that follows you out of the hospital, out of the courtroom, and into every room you enter for the rest of your life.
Katrina Brownlee didn’t lie for him. She testified. He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison.
He served ten years.
Here’s the thing that haunts me about her story… he knew. Before he ever pulled the trigger, he knew exactly what he was risking. During the attack, while Katrina was bleeding on the floor and begging for her life, she asked who would take care of their children when she was gone.
“My mother,” he said. “Then I’ll take care of them when I get out of jail. I’m only going to get five to fifteen anyway.”
Let that sink in. Mid-murder, this man had already calculated his sentence. He had factored it into the decision.
He wasn’t wrong about the math, either. Ten bullets. Ten years. One year per attempt on her life. A decade of his time traded for a decade of hers spent relearning how to exist in a body that had been shattered by someone she trusted. And then he walked. Built him a new life.
She built one too… but hers came with a limp, with scars, with the kind of PTSD that made her first day at the police academy gun range almost unbearable. Yeah, you read that right. She became a cop. Rose to first-grade NYPD detective. Served on the Mayor’s security detail. Katrina Brownlee didn’t just survive… she became the thing she once desperately needed and couldn’t find.
What most people don’t understand about her attack is how deliberate it was. This wasn’t a man who snapped. This was a man who planned.
He had nailed the windows shut. Cut the phone lines. Emptied her drawers so she’d have to walk deeper into the house looking for her things. When she came around the corner, his service revolver was aimed at her face.
“This is the day you gonna die, bitch.”
And then he shot her in the stomach. Three times. She was five months pregnant.
When she tried to scream for help, he laughed. “You can scream all you want. Nobody’s going to hear you. No matter where you go in this house, you won’t be able to get out.”
She tried anyway. Tried the phone… dead. Tried the windows… sealed. Tried to reason with him, to plead, to survive. He kept shooting. Kept kicking her. Beat her with a wooden board he’d purchased in advance.
Katrina wrote something in her book that I haven’t been able to shake: “People who want to fatally shoot someone will do it quickly… one bullet, in the head. Larry didn’t want that for me. He wanted me to die, but he wanted it to happen slowly. He wanted to torture me first. He wanted to make me suffer.”
When it was over, he thought he’d finished the job. Dragged her unconscious body to the bathtub. Left her to bleed out. When his cousin showed up at the door, his first words were: “Yo, I did it… I killed Trina.”
But he hadn’t. Luck, or incompetence… take your pick.
So here’s where my brain gets stuck…
What if he had succeeded in his mission to kill her? What if he’d been a better shot? What if bullet number six had been two inches to the left? What if she’d bled out in that bathtub instead of being found?
The intent would have been identical. The action would have been identical. The only difference is luck… or his incompetence. And yet the legal system treats these as fundamentally different crimes.
Attempted murder. Murder. Separated by one word, one outcome. But not one choice.
This past October, almost exactly two years after Christina Horsfall was shot fourteen times by her boyfriend, she faced him in court.
Fourteen. With an AR-style rifle. While she was trying to flee with her two toddlers.
She described the relationship the way so many survivors do… “a lot of control, mentally and physically.” The kind of stuff that sounds clinical until you realize it’s the only way to talk about years of terror without falling apart on the stand.
They caught him within thirty minutes. A thermal imaging drone found the coward hiding in a ditch. Justice moved fast that day.
But here’s the thing…
Christina Horsfall is learning to walk again. Relearning, really. The same legs that carried her babies toward the door are now being taught, slowly, painfully, how to function after fourteen rounds tore through her body. She is rebuilding her life while he sits in a courtroom arguing over charges and sentencing guidelines.
Fourteen times. Couldn’t finish the job. And because he couldn’t, she’s alive… and his sentence will reflect “attempted” murder instead of murder. As if trying really hard to kill someone but failing earns you a discount.
If she had died that day, there would be no debate. No parsing of intent. No discussion about whether the charges fit the crime. She’d be a murder victim, he’d be a murderer, and the math would be simple.
But she lived. So, it’s complicated.
I get the legal logic (oxymoron?). Outcomes matter. The harm caused by murder is, in the most literal sense, greater than the harm caused by attempted murder. One woman is dead. One woman is alive. That difference matters, but it’s a view from only one side.
The part of me that spent years in law enforcement watching how these cases actually play out knows something the legal textbooks don’t capture…
The person who pulls the trigger one time, ten times, fourteen times, and fails to kill their victim didn’t make a different choice than the person who succeeded. They made the same choice. They just got a different result. The bullet fragmented instead of hitting the artery. The victim’s neighbor heard the shots and called 911 two minutes earlier. The gun jammed on round number eleven. Or maybe, just maybe, they suck at the thing they were trying to do.
Either way, these are people who demonstrated with absolute clarity that they are capable of attempting to take a human life. And after a fraction of the sentence a murderer would serve, they’re back out on our streets. Near our friends, our families… and sometimes, terrifyingly, near their previous victims.
Luck or incompetence. Those are the two reasons these women are alive. And somehow, we’ve built a legal system that rewards both.
Katrina Brownlee is out there right now, still building, still healing, still showing up. She took the worst thing that ever happened to her and turned it into fuel for a life of service. She didn’t ask for the badge to be a symbol… she just wanted to be the help she never got.
Meanwhile, the piece of garbage who shot her ten times… who nailed the windows shut and cut the phone lines… who told her, “This is the day you gonna die, bitch” and meant it… is living free amongst us all. Working in healthcare. Married. Building a life he intentionally tried to deny her.
I’m not here to propose specific sentencing guidelines.
But I am here to ask you, as a fellow independent thinker: If your loved one were the victim, and the only thing separating attempted murder from murder was a centimeter, a second, or the shooter’s lack of proficiency… should their sentence really be so disparate?
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Tegan Broadwater spent 13 years with the Fort Worth Police Department, including two years assigned to the FBI working deep undercover inside a violent Crip organization. That operation—detailed in his book Life in the Fishbowl—resulted in 51 convictions. He now runs Tactical Systems Network, an armed security & protection firm primarily staffed by veterans, and hosts The Tegan Broadwater Podcast. All book profits benefit children of incarcerated parents. Learn more at TeganBroadwater.com
