LANDER — A 32-year-old man who fled a post-prison treatment center, burglarized an oil field shop north of Riverton and shot its manager in the arm was sentenced Tuesday to between 23 and 30 years in prison.
Kevin Troy Allen Pino was also ordered to pay $5,981.86 in restitution. He received 183 days’ credit for time served during his prosecution.
Rather than going to trial on an attempted second-degreemurder charge for firing a gun directly at Riverton residentt Bobby Watts on April 29, Pino made a plea agreement.
Pino pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and admitted to being a habitual criminal, and Fremont County Chief Deputy Attorney Tim Hancock agreed to argue for no more than 30 years in prison, though he could have asked for up to 50.
On the morning of April 29, Bobby Watts chased Pino and another burglar away from a Riverton business he manages, helped deputies investigate, confronted Pino on the road, and took some gunshot shrapnel to his upper arm.
Then he started his normal workday.
The Argument
Hancock argued Tuesday in Fremont County District Court for a 27-to-30-year prison sentence for Pino.
Public defense attorney Valerie Schoneberger argued, conversely, for a 10-to-15-year term.
She noted that Pino’s co-defendant Kenneth Hebah, 18, had been sentenced to between five and eight years in prison, though with a recommendation for Wyoming’s youthful offender program.
District Court Judge Kate McKay chose a 23-to-30-year split for Pino.
Pino had used guns on people while Hebah hadn’t, McKay said, explaining the heavier sentence.
Roni Watts, Bobby’s wife, delivered a tearful impact statement Tuesday in court, saying she disagrees with Hancock dropping the attempted murder charge.
“A life was almost taken that morning. Why are we catering to this? This is what’s wrong with our community,” said Roni Watts. “Luckily, my husband was a quick reactor, (as Pino) shot through the window at him.”
Pino and Hebah had gone to the offices at M&M Well Service north of Riverton at around 3 a.m. April 29 wearing bulletproof vests and carrying handguns, said Roni Watts.
Of course they meant to harm someone, she reasoned.
“I fear for the next victim that’s going to be in his line — because he’s not done yet,” she said.
Hancock acknowledged that the sentence maximum was confined to 30 instead of 50 years under the plea agreement, but he asked McKay to order that the sentence unfold consecutively — rather than simultaneously — to an escape charge sentence being adjudicated in the Laramie County District Court.
McKay, however, voiced doubts about whether she could impose her sentencing preferences on the “second” sentencing court when she is the “first court” in the sequence.
Pino had escaped from a prison-run treatment facility just before his encounter with Bobby Watts, according to court testimony.
Schoneberger said she doubted her client would be released early on parole.
McKay said for Pino’s sake, she hoped he would be so that he wouldn’t bear a stark transition from the prison doors to the outside world.
“You will get out. And you will get to meet your grandchildren,” she said.
But, noting what she called Pino’s lack of consideration toward anything outside of himself, McKay added, “Hopefully by the time you get out you will have learned to think of others.”
It was a combination of luck and Watts’ reflexive duck, or “good reaction,” that sent this case into an argued sentencing for aggravated burglary instead of a murder trial, said the judge.
‘I’m Not An Animal’
Pino apologized to his victims at length Tuesday.
He’s been in prison almost constantly since the age of 18, he said. He has children whom he does not know. He’s taught himself to read and write while in prison, Pino added.
“Thank you for the time,” he began, speaking in a deep voice as he sat in orange scrubs, with his hair buzzed, next to Schoneberger. “I am deeply sorry — I’m deeply ashamed of it. I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
Pino lamented that “my life has been this. And I’m tired of this. I don’t want this.”
People make conclusions about him based on what they read, he said, but he insisted that there’s more to him.
“I’m not an animal. I have a heart just like everybody else,” he said.
He hinted at severe tragedies in his childhood and at “everyone around me, dying around me” currently.
The Amazing Escape Of Bobby Watts
Bobby Watts’ confrontation of the men burglarizing his shop, and his later escape under gunfire, are noteworthy.
His remote connection for the alarm at M&M Well Service woke him at 3:20 a.m. April 29, he told Cowboy State Daily in an interview days later.
He came up to the M&M building site on Burma Road just north of Riverton and found two male burglars and what he believed to be a getaway vehicle — a 2000s model Ford F-250. He chased the two men, and they fled.
Also that morning, Watts sent a rig crew out to the barrow ditches to look for the many keys that the burglars had taken.
On hearing from an employee that a man with a stolen bucket was out on the road, Watts hopped into his red F-350 pickup and drove out to confront the man.
“What’s in the bucket?” Watts demanded of the man on the road, later identified as Pino.
“You don’t want to know,” answered Pino, according to Watts’ account.
“Yeah, I do want to know,” Watts countered.
The man with the bucket pulled out his .22-caliber pistol and raised it at Watts, the latter said.
Watts threw his truck in reverse and hammered the gas pedal, hoping he wouldn’t hit anything as he fled.
He also ducked.
“As soon as I ducked, the bullet come through; he shot through the window,” Watts said. Where the bullet entered, “Should have been my face.”
Because it was only a .22-caliber, Watts believes the bullet fragmented when it hit the window and only a shard of it “cauterized” his upper arm. Beads of lead embedded in his sweatshirt.
“I don’t know, it’s kind of weird looking,” said Watts with a laugh, speaking of his wound.
Watts said he started calling other people in the area to warn them about the shooter. He also stopped off at a day care down the road and urged its operators to lock their doors, he recalled.
A sheriff’s deputy told Watts to get an ambulance, “but I wasn’t hurt bad,” he said.
Watts went to work as if it had been a normal morning.
“Oh, I’m good,” he told Cowboy State Daily at the time. “I was just fine that day. We worked the rest of the day.”
Just What’s Going On Here?
Another local business man, Robert Dolcater, had also encountered Pino that morning.
The affidavit says Dolcater met Pino walking east on Burma Road and carrying that same green bucket.
Dolcater asked the man what was in the bucket.
“My jacket,” Pino answered, according to the evidentiary affidavit.
Dolcater left Pino alone but later learned the man was suspected of robbing M&M Well Service.
Dolcater later went back on the road in his 2022 white GMC pickup to see what was going on after he saw Watts’ truck speeding backward on a series of country roads, according to court documents and Watts’ interview.
Just as Dolcater passed the intersection of Darnall and Burma roads, Pino shot three times at him. One bullet lodged in the front passenger side quarter panel of his truck, the affidavit says.
“The guy just kept shooting at anybody that was coming down the road,” said Watts.
A camper sat about 100 yards east of there in front of a home on Young Road.
Deputies later found Pino hiding under the camper.
He resisted arrest and was tased while deputies tried to pull him from the camper’s underside, says the affidavit.
Investigators found the green Menard’s bucket in the front yard of another home on Young Road. It was full of keys taken from M&M stuffed under a black zip-up hoodie, the document says.
Deputies also found a black nylon handgun holster in the front yard of yet another nearby home on Young Road, and a .22-caliber revolver on a two-track dirt road across the canal.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
