Michigan man who shot 84-year-old pro-life campaigner sentenced to community service

Here’s a story you likely didn’t hear much about. From LSN:

A 75-year-old Michigan man has been sentenced to community service for shooting an elderly pro-life woman, which he insisted, “was an accident.”  On May 23, Judge Suzanne Hoseth Kreeger ordered Richard Harvey to serve 100 hours community service and gave him a suspended jail sentence of two months and a delayed sentence of one year on probation for shooting elderly pro-life volunteer Joan Jacobson in September 2022. 

Last month, Harvey pleaded no contest to felonious assault, careless discharge of a firearm causing injury, and reckless discharge of a firearm. “It was an accident,” Harvey claimed of the shooting, despite admitting that he let off a warning shot before shooting Jacobson in the back where the bullet went through her shoulder, very narrowly missing her spine.

At the time of the incident, Harvey told the local outlet WoodTV that he thought Jacobson was going to hit his wife with a clipboard when she was talking to her about abortion as part of her on-the-ground activism. “So without thinking, I went to club it away with the rifle and my finger was still in the trigger guard,” he said. “It went off and hit her about in here.” 

However, according to Jacobson, she was leaving the property when Harvey shot her in the back. “When that registered in my mind, I heard a shot, I felt some pain, and I thought he had hit me in the back,” she said. “I was just in shock. I said to myself, ‘Did I just get shot? Did he just shoot me?’” 

“I do think that he knew what he was doing,” Jacobson declared. “I think it was intentional.” 

Harvey was also ordered to pay $347.19 in restitution and to avoid all contact with Jacobson. While Harvey received minimal penalties for shooting an elderly woman, pro-life priest Father Fidelis Moscinski and three others were sentenced to jail time for taking part in a Red Rose Rescue in April 2021.

The shooter claims he accidentally shot the elderly pro-lifer because he thought she was a threat—but she was eighty-four years old. What man thinks a woman in her eighties is a threat? He also fired a “warning shot”—again, at an elderly lady with a clipboard. What was he “warning” her about? What sort of threat did he think she posed?

One thing is for certain: If this was an elderly abortion rights campaigner shot in the back by an irate pro-lifer who first fired a “warning shot,” this story would have played out very, very differently in the press—and would likely have been addressed by pro-abortion politicians up to and including the president of the United States.