Federal judge sentences drug dealer who shot deputy at motel to 25 years
Jun. 3—A St. Louis man acquitted of assault in the shooting of a Jasper County deputy at a Joplin motel four years ago was sentenced this week in federal court to 25 years in prison for drug trafficking and illegally discharging a firearm.
U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool ordered E.F. Fitchpatrick Jr., 47, to serve 350 months in a federal prison without parole but gave him credit for having already served 50 months while in custody on state charges in the March 1, 2017, shooting of Deputy Nolan Murray at the Econo Lodge Motel on South Range Line Road.
Fitchpatrick pleaded guilty a year ago in federal court to conspiring to distribute methamphetamine and to discharging a firearm during a drug-trafficking crime and was sentenced as a career offender due to a number of prior felony convictions.
Fitchpatrick had been released from a federal prison a few months earlier and was traveling back and forth to Texas to pick up methamphetamine that he was peddling in the Joplin area in the weeks before the shooting of the deputy.
Officers with the Ozarks Drug Enforcement Team were executing a search warrant on his room at the Econo Lodge Motel and were having trouble forcing the door open, prompting one officer to break out the room's window with a battering ram.
Murray had reached inside the window to pull a curtain aside when the defendant, who was standing in the doorway of the room's bathroom, shot him.
Fitchpatrick subsequently barricaded himself in the bathroom, flushed what drugs he had in the room down the toilet and shot himself in the face before surrendering.
A McDonald County jury acquitted Fitchpatrick of first-degree assault and armed criminal action counts in a July 2019 trial during which he claimed that he believed members of the Joplin Honkies prison gang were trying to break into his room and rob him of his drugs and money when he shot the deputy.
He told jurors that he had an argument over money the previous night with a woman who was helping him distribute the meth in Joplin, and she had left the room threatening "repercussions" for him with the Honkies.
The state court jury, however, did find Fitchpatrick guilty of possessing a firearm as a felon, namely, the .380-caliber handgun with which he shot Murray, and he was sentenced to 10 years on that count.
A federal grand jury's sealed indictment of the defendant was made public a day after he was sentenced on the state charge in 2019.
Jeff Lehr is a reporter for The Joplin Globe.
