Man who sold gun to shooter in 2019 Texas massacre sentenced to two years in prison
The gun dealer who sold the Midland/Odessa mass killer an AR-15 used in the 2019 massacre was sentenced on Thursday to two years in a federal prison, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Marcus Anthony Braziel, 45, of Lubbock, had pleaded guilty in October to federal counts of dealing firearms without a license and subscribing to a false tax return.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix sentenced Braziel on Thursday to 24 months.
The Lubbock man is scheduled to surrender to prison officials by April 7.
Braziel admitted to selling the weapon to Seth Aaron Ator on Oct. 8, 2016, nearly three years before Ator used the weapon to kill seven people and wound 25 others in the 2019 Labor Day weekend shooting in the Midland/Odessa area, according to federal court records. Ator also was shot and killed.
Ator, who had been adjudicated as “mentally defective” and was therefore legally prohibited from possessing firearms, first attempted to purchase a gun from a sporting goods store, but was rejected after the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) flagged his mental status. He later circumvented the NICS system by purchasing a gun from Braziel, who elected not to run background checks on any of his buyers, federal authorities said.
In a four-year span, Braziel sold firearms to four prohibited persons: a convicted felon, a man under felony indictment, an immigrant in the United States illegally, and Ator, according to federal court documents.
In addition to concealing his unlicensed dealings, Braziel admitted he also he hid the income from his firearms sales from the Internal Revenue Service.
