An Adams County man was sentenced to 192 years in prison last week after shooting a mother and her son in a Dollar General Store in 2021, according to court records.
Johnny McCaslin, 51, was sentenced to 96 years for each attempted murder by Adams County District Court Judge Sean Patrick Finn, the mandatory minimum sentence, officials from the 17th District Attorney’s Office said in a Tuesday news release.
“These horrific shootings are absolutely unconscionable,” District Attorney Brian Mason said in the release. “This defendant ambushed two at-risk individuals, one of whom was in a wheelchair, in broad daylight, in the middle of a store, for no reason at all and shot them multiple times, leaving them for dead.”
Both victims survived the shooting, Mason said in the release.
On March 18, 2024, an Adams County jury found McCaslin guilty of two counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault and four violent crime sentence enhancers, court records show.
A second jury in November found McCaslin to be a habitual criminal — adding another five sentence enhancers — given that he had previously been convicted on six separate occasions for burglary and was on parole at the time of the shooting, prosecutors said in the news release.
The shooting happened around 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2021, just north of Denver’s Regis neighborhood, police said.
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McCaslin and his girlfriend were shopping at the Dollar General Store near West 53rd Place and Sheridan Boulevard when McCaslin shot a mentally disabled man and his mother, who was in a wheelchair, multiple times “without provocation,” prosecutors said.
“The male victim was shot once in the stomach and needed several feet of his internal organs removed during emergency surgery to avoid death due to internal bleeding,” prosecutors said in the release. “The female victim was shot in the thigh, leg and foot, and also would have died if not for the emergency team at Denver Health.”
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