Parrish man was upgrading wife’s AR-15 when gun went off, shooting and killing her
Blake Meadows was working on his wife’s AR-15 on Sept. 13 when she had stepped out onto the back porch of their Parrish home and the semi-automatic rifle went off, ricocheting off the glass door frame and striking her in the right side of her face.
Meadows jumped through the shattered glass door and began performing CPR on his 30-year-old wife, hung up a business call and called 911. A neighbor who heard him screaming for help ran over and took over CPR until first-responders arrived, but they were unable to revive her.
“Today, the defendant admitted to pulling the trigger, saying he was testing the trigger,” Assistant State Attorney Curtis Griffin said in court Friday afternoon.
Meadows, 33, was arrested Thursday and charged with manslaughter with a firearm and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He made his first appearance in court before Circuit Judge Edward Nicholas on Friday afternoon.
Nicholas set bond at $70,000, citing his military service, ties to community, including being a local business owner, and he wasn’t considered a flight risk. The jail’s website showed he was still in custody as of Friday evening.
“The allegation here is the significantly negligent handling of the firearm, such that resulted in the death of your wife. Clearly not intentional, but she is no less dead as a result of your negligence and indifference of her welfare by the handling of the firearm in such a grossly careless manner,” Nicholas told Meadows after hearing from the prosecutor and defense.
Meadows has been cooperating with the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office and has retained defense attorney Brett McIntosh. After questioning him for hours the day of the shooting, Meadows was released but could not return to the home in the the 4200 block of Cottage Hill Avenue in the Silverleaf community that the couple were renting because the scene was still being processed for evidence and “because it was just too painful for him to be there,” McIntosh said.
Since then, Meadows has been living in a hotel and has already signed the lease on a new home in Manatee County. Meadows spends his days at his in-laws’ house to spend time with the couple’s children, ages 1 and 4, who are currently in the grandparents’ custody, and carrying the urn with his wife’s ashes around with him in his car, his attorney explained.
Meadows, who served in the military in the infantry, including at least one tour in Afghanistan, has since become a gunsmith of sorts, McIntosh told the court.
“He has been buying and building guns for quite some time,” McIntosh said before addressing the possession of a firearm by a convicted felon charge. “It is my understanding that this is news to him, that charge, which is described as a Class 4 felony offense in Illinois.”
Court records in Kane County, Illinois, show that Meadows was charged with two counts of false personation of a police officer in August 2010 — Class 4 felonies. Records detailing the disposition of those charges were not immediately available.
McIntosh still needed to investigate the alleged underlying conviction, he explained on Friday.
What led detectives to charge husband?
In the hours after the shooting, Meadows told detectives with the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office that he had recently updated the trigger on the new AR-15, a CMMG Banshee, and had was installing a sling and holographic sight to the rifle that day, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. As he was working on the semi-automatic rifle, Meadows was talking to his business partner on the phone using his Apple Airpods.
Meadows had bought and was upgrading the AR-15 for his wife, according to his attorney.
Detectives say Meadows told them he was walking through the kitchen area and attempted to put down the AR-15 on the kitchen table, near where the baby’s highchair was, using both hands but that the firearm went off before he had even set it down.
After his neighbor had taken over CPR, Meadows took the AR-15 to a safe in his office, where it was later found with blood on it by investigators.
But where detectives found a spent 9 mm spent casing did not match up with Meadows story, according to the affidavit. The casing was found in the kitchen near the archway that led to the formal dinning room — the complete opposite side of the room from the kitchen table.
“During the interview, Blake was asked several times if he was sure that he was placing the gun on the kitchen table and not on the island countertop. Blake was adamant that it was the table near the highchair,” a detective wrote.
“Blake was asked if it was possible he was pointing the gun in (his wife’s) direction and looking through the scoop when the gun was fired. It was at this time that there was a change in his demeanor (which) seemed to change as he advised that he knows better and that he wouldn’t do that.”
The sheriff’s office later enlisted Knox and Associates, a crime scene reconstruction company, to analyze the scene and evidence in the case in order to determine where the AR-15 had been positioned when it was fired. Their final report outlined where the rifle would have had to be — the far side of kitchen where the casing was found. The kitchen table where Meadows insisted the AR-15 was accidentally fired from was excluded from the zone outlined.
