On the early morning of October 3, 2009, in Phoenix, Arizona, 39-year-old Kelly Ann Jaeger, a Caucasian female, was walking with her boyfriend, Jeffery Wellmaker, who is African-American. Their path took them near Palma Park, where they encountered Travis Ricci, a neo-Nazi. Ricci began harassing the couple, directing racial slurs at Wellmaker and questioning why he was with a white woman.
The verbal aggression escalated, with Ricci threatening to come back for Wellmaker.
Ricci departed from the park and went to a friend's home where he had been partying with other white supremacists. He falsely claimed to have witnessed a Black man assaulting a white woman, enlisting the help of a fellow neo-Nazi associate, Aaron Schmidt. The two men then set out in a sedan, with Schmidt driving and Ricci armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, to find Jaeger and Wellmaker. They located the couple near a payphone at 415 East Puget Avenue. As the vehicle approached, it passed them, made a U-turn, and circled back.
From the passenger seat of the car, Ricci fired the shotgun, intending to strike Wellmaker. Instead, the blast hit Kelly Ann Jaeger in the stomach. Wellmaker, unharmed but distraught, watched as the vehicle fled the scene. He immediately called 911 from the nearby payphone. When police arrived, they found him holding Jaeger's hand, pleading with her to wake up. She was rushed to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival, just two days shy of her 40th birthday.
The Phoenix Police Department's investigation led them to Travis Ricci and Aaron Schmidt. Ricci was arrested on July 19, 2010, and Schmidt was located and arrested in Tennessee on September 1, 2010. Both men were charged with first-degree murder and attempted homicide, with the case being prosecuted as a hate crime. Aaron Schmidt eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for his role as the driver. After his first trial ended in a mistrial, Travis Ricci was convicted in a subsequent trial of murder, attempted murder, and other charges. The jury sentenced him to life in prison.
