I always appreciate when a nickname captures a person’s true self. Take Cameron “Crazy Gun” Watkins, for instance.
The OakTree Inn & Suites in Oklahoma City is now permanently closed. It’s reviews online weren’t great so you probably haven’t missed out. Tripadvisor ranked it 181 out of 182 hotels in OKC. (I don’t know which hotel came in last.)
But in 2021, it was the kind of place where a carjacker might hide out. Or where you might get carjacked.
That is where police found ol’ Crazy Gun Watkins. A suspect in a recent carjacking. Committed in the motel’s parking lot.
Though the motel wasn’t great, the manager was civic-minded and told the cops that Watkins matched the description of the man who carjacked and kidnapped a woman in the parking lot a few hours before. (The woman thankfully escaped and described her assailant to police.)
Police went to his room and peered in the window through a narrow opening in the curtains. There on the bed sat Watkins, wearing no pants. Beside him on the bed was a gun with an extended mag.
They knocked on the door. He did not come out. A three-hour standoff followed. Eventually he emerged and police searched the room with a search warrant. They found the gun and he was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.
At this point you might ask, “Why wasn’t he also charged with the carjacking?” Turns out he wasn’t the carjacker after all. The victim mistakenly identified him. (I’ve written before about the fallibility of eye-witnesses, in this Big Lebowski themed post).
But he was still a felon and still had a gun. (And there’s a whole side story to this case. Though Watkins wasn’t the carjacker in this case, he was the suspect in a murder about a year later. Prosecutors used the ammo from this gun to connect him to that shooting.)
Watkins moved to suppress the search, arguing police violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search by entering onto what he described as the “porch” area of the room and looking through the partially closed curtains.
The trial court denied the motion. He appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. It affirmed.
The opinion includes pictures of the motel room (which looks very grubby). The motel is the type with open-air walkways, where every room opens to outside. That means the area in front of the room was open to any passerby, so the officer was standing in a public place when he looked through the window. It was not the motel room’s “curtilage.”
And what the officer could see with his unaided eye through the curtain Watkins left partially open was fair game.
One judge dissented but Crazy Gun stays convicted.
You can read the opinion here.
I missed this case when it was published in October, but saw it recently thanks the the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers legal bulletin, The Informer.