Confrontations in ‘no man’s land’ charged as major case, resolved with probation

The charges stemmed from a pair of incidents on Sept. 8, 2020 that began when Robinson, then 53, confronted a man and woman in their 50s who said they had unwittingly trespassed onto his ranch along the U.S.-Mexico border in far Western Santa Cruz County. According to law enforcement accounts, the pair told sheriff’s deputies that a man later determined to be Robinson followed their vehicle, then cut them off, pointed a gun at them and ordered them out of their vehicle

Later that night, at around 11 p.m., sheriff’s deputies and Border Patrol agents went to Robinson’s home in response to the complaint. When a deputy went to the door, Robinson fired a shot at him.

The bullet missed, and Robinson stepped out of his home, apologized and surrendered. Robinson was then arrested and booked into the Santa Cruz County jail with bond initially set at $500,000. He remained incarcerated for the next 45 days.

“This could have been such a huge, huge disaster,” prosecutor Susie Charbel said during Robinson’s sentencing hearing on Oct. 3 at Santa Cruz County Superior Court. “If that sheriff’s deputy had passed away, this defendant would be looking at the death penalty.”

As the case moved forward, County Attorney George Silva sought outside help to prosecute it. He chose Charbel, a former Maricopa County deputy attorney, whom he hired for a flat fee of $8,000, plus $160 per day for food and lodging.

But by the time the sentencing hearing came, the case had shifted considerably in Robinson’s favor. The two kidnapping counts and the three charges of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon had been pleaded down to one count of attempted aggravated assault and one count of disorderly conduct. The “dangerous nature” allegations were gone, and the two remaining counts were designated as non-dangerous felonies.

What’s more, the prosecution and defense had agreed that Robinson would be sentenced to probation rather than prison.

Still, the probation term could have included up to a year in the county jail, which is what the County Probation Department recommended in its pre-sentence report. Charbel said the victims wanted Robinson to serve nine months of jail time.

But in the end, Judge Vanessa Cartwright gave Robinson three years of supervised probation – with no additional jail time.

“I don’t believe it would serve the interest of justice to impose an additional sentence in this case,” she said.

So what happened with the state’s case, such that a defendant accused of kidnapping a pair of tourists at gunpoint and then shooting at a cop ended up with a sentence that might be more realistically expected for a shoplifter?

Defense lawyers say it’s not uncommon for prosecutors to overcharge a defendant in the early stages of a case, which can lead to wide discrepancies between initially alleged offenses and final outcomes. But documents included in Robinson’s two-volume court file, as well as statements from the sentencing hearing, show a number of other factors at play, including Robinson’s personal history, his own account of the fateful events, an understanding victim and another victim who died under unrelated circumstances before the matter could be resolved.

What’s more, Robinson’s lawyer hammered home to the judge an image of his client’s home turf as a semi-lawless and isolated corner of the county where Robinson justifiably lived on edge. And for her part, the judge, in explaining the sentence, cast a skeptical eye on law enforcement’s tactics in affecting Robinson’s arrest.

The first incident

According to the probation department’s pre-sentence report, on Sept. 8, 2020, a sheriff’s deputy spoke with a couple who said they had been sightseeing near the border in the area of Robinson’s Tres Bellotas Ranch.

“When they were returning from their trip, they were being followed by a vehicle which was flashing its lights and honking its horn,” the report says.

The couple said they stopped their car and were approached by a tall, slender male who was verbally abusive and told them they were trespassing. The pair said they told the man they didn’t know they were trespassing because they hadn’t seen any signs. But when they tried to drive away, Robinson followed and side-swiped them.

“The couple stated they pulled over and Lowell positioned his vehicle in front, blocking them (and) preventing them from leaving,” the report says. “Lowell then exited his vehicle and aimed a single-barrel handgun at them and ordered them out of their vehicle.”

The couple said Robinson calmed down, then dropped the gun on the ground before picking it up and tucking it in his waistband.

The report doesn’t mention the time of day the encounter occurred, but the couple eventually ran into a U.S. Border Patrol agent, who reported the incident to the Sheriff’s Office. Call logs from that day show sheriff’s dispatchers received a call about the matter from the Border Patrol at 6:51 p.m. on Sept. 8, 2020.

When Judge Cartwright asked Robinson during his Oct. 3 sentencing hearing what time the confrontation happened, he said “about 5 p.m.,” adding that he called a top Border Patrol agent immediately afterward.

Robinson noted that the incident occurred around the time that a contractor began constructing a new border wall system in Western Santa Cruz County and Eastern Pima County that included improved access roads.

“They had asked me, two weeks before, to help the Border Patrol watch who was coming in and out on the roads, because they had just opened up the border road to many different areas,” he told the judge as he explained his thought process that day.

“That opened it up to where there could be a whole lot more illegal activity,” he continued. “And when I saw that Jeep, I figured they were someone down there trying to smuggle.”

The confrontation with the couple led to four of the initial five charges against Robinson: the two kidnapping counts (Class 2 felonies) and two of the three aggravated assault charges (Class 4 felonies). But in the end, Robinson pleaded guilty to only one charge in which either of the pair was identified as the victim: a Class 4 felony count of attempted aggravated assault.

The original judge in the Superior Court case, Thomas Fink, expressed concern during a hearing in August that he might be presented at the sentencing hearing with a stark discrepancy between Robinson’s alleged conduct and the facts established in the plea agreement he received from the state. The defense responded by requesting a new judge – a motion unopposed by the prosecution – and Fink reassigned the case to Cartwright.

In the end, the victims in the trespassing confrontation did not give impact statements at the sentencing hearing, and Charbel, the prosecutor, focused her remarks to the judge on the incident later that day, when law enforcement went to Robinson’s ranch.

But the probation officer who wrote the pre-sentence report noted that she called one of the victims on Aug. 16. Paraphrasing the conversation, the officer wrote that the woman said that “everybody has bad days, and (Robinson) could have simply said he had a bad day and didn’t expect an apology.”

The victim “stated she would like for him to attend anger management because it seemed he had a lot of anger built up inside of him, based on the way he came up to them,” the officer wrote.

As for any personal harm she or her husband suffered from the incident, the only comments from the victim that were noted in the report were that “what made a lasting impression on her was the fact that (Robinson) had his young son inside the vehicle, and the son wouldn’t look at them and was only staring straight ahead.”

The second incident

Following the report of Robinson’s confrontation with the tourists on Sept. 8, 2020, Border Patrol agents and sheriff’s deputies gathered at a gas station in Arivaca and prepared to head to the Tres Bellotas Ranch, former NI reporter Nick Phillips wrote in a story at the time, citing information provided by a Sheriff’s Office spokesman.

“The ranch lies about 14 miles down a rough-hewn dirt road south of the town, impassible without an off-road vehicle,” wrote Phillips, who knew the lay of the land first hand, having traveled to the ranch to meet Robinson approximately 10 months earlier.

Speaking during the sentencing hearing, Charbel, the prosecutor, didn’t offer much detail about the police response, including the time it occurred. But the Sheriff’s Office spokesman who spoke to Phillips in September 2020 said the deputies and agents arrived at Robinson’s residence around 10:30 or 11 p.m. That’s approximately five or six hours after Robinson said he called the Border Patrol official about the encounter with the couple, and three-and-a-half to four hours after the Sheriff’s Office logged a call from the Border Patrol about the incident.

Charbel’s most descriptive account of the circumstances of the shooting came when she told the judge:

“There was a lot of police presence. The Sheriff’s Office and the Border Patrol people, and everybody is screaming and hollering. And if you’ve heard police officers at a scene, how loud they are as they approach, there was a lot of announcing themselves and saying, ‘This is who we are, etc.’”

But when it was Robinson’s turn to address the court, he offered a substantially different account.

“My wife is the one that woke me up at 11 o’clock at night and said, ‘There’s someone speaking Spanish outside the bedroom door,’” he said. “And when I went out and I said, ‘Hey,’ he told me in Spanish, ‘Come outside, we want to talk to you.’ Never once did he say law enforcement, sheriff, policia, nothing. And I did what I did.”

Charbel acknowledged that after firing his gun, Robinson “kind of blurted out, ‘If I had known you were police officers, I wouldn’t have shot at you.’”

Still, she added: “That doesn’t really make you feel any better, because it could have been another person who just happened to walk up.”

As part of his agreement with the state, Robinson pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly conduct, a Class 5 felony, for shooting at the deputy. He had initially been charged in 2020 with one count of aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon, a Class 2 felony.

The sheriff’s deputy who avoided taking the bullet was unable to provide a victim impact statement at the sentencing, and wouldn’t have been able to testify if the case had gone to trial. As Charbel told the judge, the deputy has since died due to circumstances unrelated to the incident with Robinson.

But according to the pre-sentence report, after the shot was fired, the deputy “felt the left side of his face trembling, he felt as if he were injured, he felt numbness and discomfort left to the side of his face.”

The deputy “felt his life, as well as the lives of those other law enforcement (officers) that were there with him, (was) in danger.” In his own report of the incident, the deputy wrote “that he felt anxious, nervous, scared and helpless when he saw the barrel of the gun being discharged at him.”

Apologizing for the incident, Robinson told Judge Cartwright: “I’d have never, ever fired a shot at someone that I thought was law enforcement and I’m truly sorry for that. But it was a scary time. The cartels were hot and heavy all along the border. In fact, we had been watching five cartel members, sicarios, on the mountain for days, watching us when they were building the border wall.”

Reiterating his support for law enforcement, Robinson said he had “dear friends” in the Border Patrol, and said retired sheriff’s deputies had come to court that day to support him.

“They have been by my side at the border for many years whenever we needed them,” he said of law enforcement.

Still, Robinson has had his difficulties with the Border Patrol.

He told the NI in late 2019 that agents patrolling in the area routinely left livestock fences open, and that he had reported a Border Patrol agent for wrongdoing in January of that year.

In November 2019, less than a year before Border Patrol agents and sheriff’s deputies surrounded his home in response to the incident with the sightseers, an employee at the ranch discovered a Border Patrol surveillance camera that Robinson said was on his private property and pointed at his home. Robinson took the camera and, for nearly two weeks, refused to give it back.

The story about the camera was the fourth-most read article on the Nogales International’s website in 2019, and it generated a fair amount of reader criticism of the Border Patrol. But if someone who read the story, then heard Robinson’s account of his nighttime arrest on Sept. 8, 2020 and wondered if there was a connection between law enforcement’s choice of tactics and Robinson’s outspokenness, nobody who spoke at the sentencing brought it up.

‘A long way from anywhere’

In his comments at the hearing, Robinson’s lawyer, Clay Hernandez, focused not on the facts of the case, but on Robinson’s character, community support and the area where he lives.

“It is a long way from anywhere, and it abuts the Mexican border,” Hernandez said of the ranch’s location.

“Judge, in that part of the world where my client lives, it’s not Nogales. It’s not Sonoita. It’s not Rio Rico. It’s the National Forest, it’s deeded land, and it abuts Mexico,” he said. “The area is home, or is regularly utilized, by folks who are transporting aliens for profit. Who are illegally trying to enter this country. Who are running drugs. Who are running other items…”

Hernandez insisted he wasn’t trying to justify what Robinson did. But he wanted to make a point in regard to the question of whether his client should serve additional jail time.

“He was on his property, a long way from any of us right now. And it’s that sort of thing that I think the court needs to keep in mind when determining what the appropriate resolution is for my client, because of where it took place and the circumstances – not that happened – but that these folks live under every single day,” Hernandez said.

Robinson, in his remarks to the judge, talked about the hours it would take for the Sheriff’s Office to send a deputy from Nogales to his home if he and his family called for help.

“We are in a no man’s land down there,” he said. “And it doesn’t justify what I did. But I’m just trying to explain to you why, that night I was woken up out of a dead sleep at 11 o’clock at night, someone talking Spanish to me … and I’m truly sorry that that happened.”

Hernandez noted that Robinson, now 55, had never been in trouble with the law before, that he had served in the military and had a good family. He pointed to the crowd of supporters in the gallery and the large number of letters written to the judge by Robinson’s peers, many of them fellow ranchers whom Hernandez referred to as “rockstars of the Southern Arizona Cattlegrowers Association.”

Hernandez noted that the incidents happened more than two years earlier, and Robinson hasn’t had any problems with the law since then. Meanwhile, he said, Robinson had signed up for counseling and apologized to his victims.

“He has done, what I think he needs to do for you, for the probation department and the victims in this case, to show you that he is somebody that doesn’t need to go back into jail,” the lawyer said.

The sentence

When it came time to announce the sentence, Judge Cartwright began with Robinson’s confrontation of the couple who said they had accidentally trespassed.

“I’m certainly sympathetic to the experience they had in this case,” she said. “But I’m also very aware of, and I’m also very understanding, of the specific challenges that you face, that your family faces, that your ranch faces on what must be a constant basis with the proximity to the border, especially in recent years.”

As for the incident later that night, when Robinson fired his gun at the deputy, Cartwright said:

“I have to be very frank when I say, I was not there, but I question the decision of law enforcement to approach your home at dark, in the night, at 11 p.m., to make contact with you, knowing what the environment is like and knowing what goes on there at night. I wonder if perhaps that second incident could not have been avoided altogether had that not occurred.”

The judge said Robinson appeared to appreciate the seriousness of his crimes and reflected on them. She noted that he had no prior criminal history, and lots of support from family and friends.

“I understand that the recommendation in this case is for one year of jail time, and that the recommendation of the state is nine months. But the court is not going to impose any additional jail at this time,” Cartwright said.

She gave Robinson credit for the 45 days he had served in jail following his arrest, and opted not to order him to perform 100 hours of community service. Since he said he was still participating in counseling, she didn’t order any additional counseling or classes.