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George Alan Kelly, an Arizona rancher who was accused of killing an undocumented immigrant alleged to have run across his property, is receiving a hero's welcome in conservative media after his case ended in a mistrial.
Kelly was charged with second-degree murder after an investigation into the shooting of an unarmed man named Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea in 2023. Prosecutors said that Kelly recklessly fired an AK-47 at a group of men on his cattle ranch, while Kelly said that he only fired warning shots in the air.
The trial helped turn him into something of a right-wing icon. But on April 19, the jury in his trial deadlocked. And on Monday, Arizona prosecutors said they won’t retry the case.
Predictably, the news that Kelly will be allowed to walk free has been gleefully shared across conservative media, which has developed a disturbing affinity for cheerleading armed vigilantes and extrajudicial punishment in the age of Donald Trump.
As far-right social media accounts cheer Kelly on, ultraconservative media outlets like Newsmax have portrayed him as a heroic figure. He sat for a softball interview with conservative News Nation reporter Ali Bradley in which he spoke somberly of all the hardships he says he’s experienced as a result of the trial.
As with Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative gunman acquitted after shooting anti-racist protesters in 2020, Kelly has become a cause célèbre among many conservatives. Arizona Republicans even sought to pass a law, seemingly in Kelly’s honor, that would expand self-defense claims for property owners to include killing or threatening to kill people who cross their property to illegally enter the U.S. The bill was ultimately vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Kelly even wrote a novel about a vigilante figure, also named George, who shoots at people who cross his property along the U.S.-Mexico border, a region the book describes as a “war zone.” Other similarities in the book — such as the protagonist’s wife having the same name as Kelly's wife — have led observers to note that the book sounds like a thinly veiled recounting of his own story.
Despite his claims of hardship, Kelly has been rewarded by the conservative media machine. He has received at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations via the conservative crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which was also used to raise funds for Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, a former Marine who has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide in the choking death of a Black man on a New York subway last year. (Penny has pleaded not guilty to both charges.)
At this rate, it wouldn't be surprising if Kelly is asked to speak at this year's Republican National Convention.