At first, Ashley Mowery’s ex-boyfriend told the Harrisburg police that she was the one who shot him in the stomach.
Then, he said she didn’t.
A state Superior Court panel has decided to believe the version where Mowery pulled the trigger.
And by doing so, the judges guaranteed that Mowery, now 30, will keep serving a 4- to 12-year prison sentence.
Mowery received that punishment after pleading guilty to aggravated assault for the October 2015 shooting of her ex during an argument. Police found the 26-year-old man lying in a doorway of an apartment in the 400 block of Crescent Street. He had a bullet hole in his abdomen.
The state judges came down in favor of the “she shot him” scenario in an opinion by Judge Deborah A. Kunselman.
Investigators said the victim, Montez Perry, blamed Mowery for the shooting right away, as he was lying in a hospital bed being interviewed by detectives. Mowery initially claimed innocence, but then admitted to the gunplay.
Mowery’s appeal hinged on what she insisted was newly discovered evidence in the form of a letter Perry sent to her lawyer in August 2017, more than a year after she pleaded guilty and was sentenced.
In that letter Perry wrote that he lied when he told police Mowery was the shooter. He said he was in fact shot by an unknown man who was wearing a ski mask. Perry said he lied to police because he was mad that Mowery hadn’t come to visit him in the hospital.
“My heart is simply weighing heavy because of what I did and I am not able to live, basically live with myself because of it,” Perry wrote.
Dauphin County President Judge John F. Cherry didn’t find Perry’s recantation to be credible, and neither did Kunselman’s court on appeal.
Perry’s new version is just too out of line with what both he and Mowery said earlier, the judges concluded. They pointed to a statement Mowery made during her sentencing hearing in March 2016.
“Like, I deeply apologize for what I did,” she said at the time. “Like, I did it because it was in the midst of a domestic violence fight and that was, like, I really couldn’t do anything. I tried to call – I called the police before all of this even happened. I went to the police station and tried to file a report about domestic violence.”
Given those facts, Perry’s recantation would not have resulted in Mowery’s case playing out differently, Kunselman found.