DENVER – The man who killed Colorado’s prisons director was a master manipulator determined to get a gun and enact his longstanding plan for violence, a federal judge said Monday as she sentenced the woman who bought the weapon.
Stevie Marie Anne Vigil, 23, who pleaded guilty to buying the handgun for Evan Ebel, a paroled member of a white supremacist prison gang accidentally released four years early, was sentenced to more than two years in prison and three years of supervised parole. Prosecutors had asked for six years for Vigil, but U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello said they failed to show she knew of Ebel’s criminal plans.
Federal prosecutors said Ebel, 28, used the gun in the March 2013 killings of prisons chief Tom Clements and Nathan Leon, a Denver computer technician and pizza delivery driver, as well as wounding of a sheriff’s deputy in Texas, where Ebel fled. He was killed in a shootout with Texas authorities.
Vigil, a friend of Ebel’s since she was 11, “wanted an intimate relationship with Ebel, and he used that knowledge and information over her to get her to buy a gun that he couldn’t buy himself,” Arguello said.
But even if Vigil had refused, the judge said Ebel was an intelligent sociopath who would not have been stopped. He had asked others for a weapon first.
“Nothing would have deterred him. He would have found a way to carry out his longstanding plan,” she said.
In red jail scrubs, Vigil showed no visible reaction to the sentence.
The judge issued her sentence after hearing testimony from Texas Deputy James Boyd, who said the gunshot wound to the head he received when he tried to stop Ebel’s black Cadillac DeVille cost him his sense of smell and left him struggling to balance and hear.
Leon’s relatives testified their loss has strained the family and forced his three young daughters into counseling. Clements’ wife, Lisa, was expected to speak but decided it would be too painful, prosecutors said.
“Evan Ebel was an evil person,” John Leon told the judge as other relatives dabbed at their eyes with Kleenex. “To give a weapon to an evil person ... you had to expect something bad to happen.”
