Pima County judge under investigation for firing 'warning shot' at unarmed stalking suspect

Editor's note: This story has been updated.

A judge has been placed on leave and authorities are investigating a criminal case that could test the limits on when it’s legal to fire a gun in Arizona.

Justice of the Peace Adam Watters, 59, was placed on paid administrative leave last month and is under investigation for firing what he called a “warning shot” — one that landed inches from an unarmed man on a recent Sunday afternoon outside Watters’ home in the Foothills.

The man, Fei Qin, 38, of Tucson, later was arrested on suspicion of felony stalking for allegedly driving by Watters’ house repeatedly and leaving litter is his yard, public records show.

Qin, a Tucson landlord, recently had an eviction case handled by Watters in Pima County Justice Court. Some of the trash left in Watters’ yard contained mail addressed to the tenants Qin had hoped to evict, detectives said.

Watters, who usually handled domestic violence cases, said he’d only recently started doing some evictions work as well.

Around the same time the littering started, the tires on Watters’ pickup truck were slashed in two separate incidents, but so far no one has been charged for those offenses, court records show.

Deputies who searched Qin’s vehicle after the shooting found a butcher knife in a pocket behind the passenger seat, but the sheriff’s report did not establish that the knife was the same one used to slash the judge’s tires.

The report said Qin was not armed when Watters fired a round that struck the ground “directly next to” Qin.

Qin told detectives Watters forced him out of his vehicle at gunpoint, threatened to “blow his head off,” and ordered him to lie on the ground.

Watters, in his interview with detectives, acknowledged “that he did make mention of shooting (Qin) or blowing off his head” and that he’d tried to order Qin to the ground, but denied forcing Qin from his vehicle.

A cellphone the judge used to record some of the moments prior to the shooting went missing soon afterward, the sheriff’s report said.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos would not comment on the case.

“It is premature for us to make a statement” because the investigation is ongoing, Nanos said in an email to the Arizona Daily Star.

The Star recently obtained the sheriff’s report through a public-records request.

When is it legal to shoot?

Arizona has a number of laws that spell out when it is and isn’t legal to use a deadly weapon against someone else. Penalties for violators can be substantial.

For example:

• A felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon can apply when someone “intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly” uses a weapon to cause another person “fear of immediate physical harm.” Conviction carries a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence.

• A felony charge of disorderly conduct with a weapon can apply when someone uses a firearm to “disturb the peace and quiet of a neighborhood, family or person.” Sentences can range from probation to two years in prison.

Exceptions can apply in certain circumstances.

The law says use of deadly force is legally justified “to the degree a reasonable person would believe that deadly physical force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the other’s use or attempted use of unlawful deadly force.”

Whether Watters actions were justified has yet to be determined,

A felony conviction could end the judge’s career as well as his ability to legally possess a gun, but Watters’ attorney, Mike Storie, said he doubts criminal charges will be filed against his client.

Storie said prosecutors responsible for making the decision will weigh “the totality of the circumstances” — and in his view, the circumstances are in the judge’s favor.

“The analysis will have to take into account what was in Judge Watters’ mind at the time he fired his weapon,” he said.

“What would you do?”

On Feb. 14, the day of the incident, Watters’ street was already on a list of places deputies were patrolling more often because of vandalism reports from the judge’s house over a nine-day period.

By that time, Watters had had his tires slashed twice. Trash such as junk mail, burrito wrappers, salsa containers and takeout coffee cups had been left in his yard several times.

Watters told detectives two suspicious vehicles had recently been seen on his street: one a white BMW, the other a gray Subaru SUV.

A neighbor who saw the Subaru nearby during one of the littering incidents took a photo of the license plate and a few days later, the same Subaru drove by again, the sheriff’s report said.

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Watters could have called 911 and gone inside his house to wait for law enforcement, Storie acknowledged in an interview.

Instead, the judge and one of his daughters chose that day to sit outside with guns on lawn chairs hidden by landscaping, cellphones poised in hopes of getting a photo of the SUV driver.

Watters was not intending to shoot the driver, Storie said. He just wanted to be prepared in case of trouble.

By then the judge was frightened and frustrated because the vandalism had persisted despite multiple calls to law enforcement, Storie said.

“Put yourself in this guy’s shoes. What would you do? He’s afraid for his wife. He’s been harassed for days. He’s called police four times and the problem isn’t getting any better,” he said.

Watters told detectives he and Qin were a few feet away from each other just before the shot was fired.

He said Qin had left his vehicle and was standing nearby staring. The distance between them was about 3 feet according to Watters and about 5 feet according to Qin, the sheriff’s report said.

Watters said he pulled the trigger after Qin took a single step forward. He said he feared Qin might be armed even though he had not produced a weapon that day.

Cellphone missing

Watters was filming on his cellphone camera when the Subaru stopped near him at the end of his driveway

That raised the possibility the phone contained proof of what happened just before the shooting, but detectives did not take the phone into custody to be examined by a forensic expert.

Investigators faced a roadblock at first because Watters’ cellphone had disappeared by the time deputies arrived “within seconds” of the shooting, the sheriff’s report said.

The judge said his sister had stopped by briefly and must have taken his phone by mistake because their phones looked identical.

Someone — it isn’t clear who in the public records released to date — decided to let the judge’s sister keep the phone overnight instead of retrieving it from her that day.

The next day, Watters brought the phone with him to his lawyer’s office for an interview with detectives. But the only footage they found on it ended before the encounter.

The judge told investigators “he was unsure how or why” the camera had turned off and assured them the phone’s contents had not been altered since the incident.

Instead of having an expert check whether anything was removed surreptitiously, the detectives looked at a folder for recently deleted files, saw nothing suspicious, then handed the phone back to Watters, records show.

Tucson attorney Jeff Grynkewich, who represents Qin on the stalking charge, filed court paperwork last week asking the prosecution to make Watters’ phone available for forensic testing by the defense.

“A forensic audit of this phone is necessary as the only steps taken by officers solely consisted of making sure no files were within the ‘deleted files,’” Grynkewich wrote in his March 3 request filed at Pima County Superior Court.

One of the detectives later acknowledged at a preliminary hearing that “files could have been further removed from the deleted files folder,” during the time the phone was missing, Grynkewich said in his written request to the court.

He said Qin will plead not guilty to the stalking charge.

“My client has a right to be presumed innocent and he is asserting his innocence,” the defense attorney said in an interview.

Prosecutor resigns

While the incident took place in Pima County, it is not being handled by the Pima County Attorney’s Office, which typically prosecutes such cases.

The Watters case isn’t typical due to the involvement of the judge’s daughter, a prosecutor with the Pima County Attorney’s Office since late 2018.

Caitlin Watters, who brought a loaded shotgun to the scene but did not use it, was interviewed as a witness in the case. Two days later she submitted a letter of resignation from her prosecutor’s job, but a libel lawsuit she filed against the Star in January 2022 says she already had been offered a new job when the incident occurred.

Because of the Caitlin Watters connection, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover referred the case to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to avoid a conflict of interest.

The attorney general has since forwarded the matter to prosecutors in two neighboring counties, Conover said in an email.

The Cochise County Attorney has taken over Qin’s stalking case. The Pinal County Attorney’s Office is conducting a “review of Judge Watters’ use of a firearm” that will determine if the judge should face charges, she said.

Watters, a Republican, was first appointed to his post in early 2008 to replace a retiring justice, but lost the seat when he had to run for election later that year.

He was elected to his first four-year term in 2014 and reelected in 2018 to a second term that expires at the end of 2022.