{"id":2443605,"date":"2019-04-30T20:04:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T02:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/montgomery-testifies-in-his-murder-trial\/"},"modified":"2019-04-30T20:04:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T02:04:00","slug":"montgomery-testifies-in-his-murder-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/montgomery-testifies-in-his-murder-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Montgomery testifies in his murder trial"},"content":{"rendered":"
Michael Montgomery<\/strong>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michael Montgomery, accused of first-degree murder for shooting Chris Gallegos in March 2017, testified before the jury in his trial Tuesday, giving his story and spending much of the afternoon answering questions from prosecutors on the witness stand.<\/p>\n

Montgomery, 47, has been in custody since he was arrested in Oregon in September 2017, where he ended up after fleeing Rifle following the shooting death of Gallegos, then 20 and Montgomery\u2019s son-in-law.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did you shoot Chris?,\u201d defense attorney Chip McCrory asked Montgomery.<\/p>\n

Montgomery and the defense say Gallegos came out of the Acadia Apartments and aimed a gun at Montgomery. Gallegos said, \u201cI have a gun, too,\u201d according to Montgomery. \u201cI was scared for my life,\u201d Montgomery said on the stand.<\/p>\n

The shooting happened so fast, Montgomery said, that he barely had time to think.<\/p>\n

Montgomery said he had traveled to the apartment to confront another man, Anthony Bracamontes, about taking heroin belonging to Montgomery from Desirae, Montgomery\u2019s daughter, and failing to pay.<\/p>\n

Bracamontes and Montgomery had resolved their differences, but then Gallegos exited pointing a gun, according to Montgomery.<\/p>\n

Gallegos had said, \u201cI\u2019ve got a gun, too,\u201d according to Montgomery.<\/p>\n

Throughout his testimony, Montgomery said he wanted to make Bracamontes pay for ripping him off.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody knew why I was coming to see him,\u201d Montgomery said.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors pressed Montgomery for several minutes on his intentions for going over to the apartment, his Facebook messages the night before, and his flight to Oregon after the shooting.<\/p>\n

Montgomery said he suspected he would get into a fight when he went to confront Bracamontes.<\/p>\n

He brought gloves, and when he got to the apartment, where he knew both Bracamontes and Gallegos would be, he brought gloves that would protect his hands. \u201cMore than likely I was going to get into a fight, yes,\u201d he said. He could not recall where he got the gloves.<\/p>\n

Montgomery testified he said \u201chey\u201d to Gallegos, who was on the balcony of the apartment complex, when he was walking up to the building.<\/p>\n

He had backed into his parking spot expecting to make a quick getaway.<\/p>\n

Montgomery said he spotted Bracamontes\u2019 brother on the steps leading up the building and saw he had a gun in his waistband and took it. The brother seemed shocked, and didn\u2019t fight.<\/p>\n

Montgomery said he went up to the apartment, and Gallegos, Bracamontes and two others, including a pregnant woman, were inside. He testified that he didn\u2019t want to start a fight around the pregnant woman and got Bracamontes outside.<\/p>\n

Once they got downstairs, Montgomery and Bracomontes seemed to make up. Montgomery set the gun on one of the mailboxes in the yard, and had a cigarette with Bracamontes.<\/p>\n

Gallegos must have seen the gun on the mailbox, prompting him to come down, Montgomery said.<\/p>\n

District Deputy District Attorney Ben Sollars questioned Montgomery on a number of Facebook messages he had with people, including his daughter Kayla.<\/p>\n

Kayla and Gallegos were going through a divorce at the time, according to other witnesses.<\/p>\n

The messages included Kayla telling her father that she wanted Gallegos to get \u201cmessed up,\u201d and Montgomery telling Kayla: \u201cChris is ducked.\u201d (Sollars said that was likely an AutoCorrected word.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWas [Kayla] upset with [Gallegos] the day before he died?\u201d Sollars asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah. I don\u2019t want to speculate why,\u201d Montgomery said.<\/p>\n

Montgomery also told several people over Facebook that he expected he was going to prison the next day.<\/p>\n

After the shooting, Montgomery said he drove away and left the Toyota Scion belonging to his daughter, Kayla Gallegos, at someone\u2019s house in Rifle. Prosecutors asked whether he went to Kayla\u2019s house, and played a clip of a phone call between investigators and Kayla.<\/p>\n

Kayla said her car was a white Toyota, then a voice in the background whispered \u201cAvalon.\u201d Kayla then said it was an Avalon. Montgomery denied being the voice in the recording, and Kayla insisted in her own testimony that she didn\u2019t say \u201cAvalon,\u201d but \u201cScion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you stay and face the music?\u201d McCrory asked Montgomery during direct examination.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was scared. I figured, Chris had a lot of friends, and I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d be safe in jail, for one,\u201d Montgomery said.<\/p>\n

Other than a ride with a trucker that went for around 100 miles, Montgomery said he walked the hundreds of miles to Oregon. He said he would stop in towns to pick up supplies and \u201ca gallon of alcohol,\u201d and had \u201cplenty of drugs\u201d to keep him going. It\u2019s unclear how he paid his way, except he said he had $70 when he left Rifle.<\/p>\n

On April 28, 2017, he signed into an Ontario, Oregon, program for transients as \u201cRandy Webb.\u201d<\/p>\n

The defense and prosecution rested Tuesday, and will begin closing arguments Wednesday before the jury begins deliberations.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Montgomery Michael Montgomery, accused of first-degree murder for shooting Chris Gallegos in March 2017, testified before the jury in his trial Tuesday, giving his story and spending much of the afternoon answering questions from prosecutors on the witness stand. Montgomery, 47, has been in custody since he was arrested in Oregon in September 2017, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2443605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-23 16:41:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2443605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2443605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2443605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2443605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}