A jury has found her not guilty of first-degree murder.
An Oklahoma bail bondswoman says she's "never been that scared in my entire life" as she shot and killed a man she thought was trying to skip bail.
Chastity Carey will not be going to prison. In a verdict that surprised many, a jury found her not guilty, despite a video of the shooting in her Stillwater office that was released earlier this month.
"I was in shock when I saw the video," she said. "It made me look like a monster."
Carey owns a bail bond company, Signature Bail Bonds, and the man she killed was her client, 38-year-old Brandon Williams.
Williams was out on $35,000 bond and the money was put up by Carey's company.
She feared he was planning to jump bail and flee to Florida. Surveillance video shows Carey locking the door to keep Williams from escaping her office. Williams quickly realizes something is going on.
Carey's 19-year-old son, Justin, was standing by with a pair of handcuffs.
A scuffle ensued between Williams and Carey and as he ran out of the frame, she grabbed a gun from her desk and opened fire, shooting him in the back.
Carey called 911 to report that she had shot a man.
Her son, clearly in shock, can be heard on the surveillance video saying, "Mom, you shot him."
In the video, she admits to firing the fatal shots, but Carey says there's more to the story that the footage doesn't show.
Speaking to Inside Edition, she claimed she shot the man in self-defense, and that her decision to fire the lethal shot was based on what happened off-camera.
Carey says she fired as Williams was trying to make a grab for her gun, but Stillwater police Sgt. Kyle Bruce says that's not true.
"He never possessed the gun, he never had the gun, that gun was closed in a drawer until Ms. Carey pulled out the gun," he said. "She was the aggressor. Mr. Williams was never violently aggressive toward either one of them."
From the video alone, it seemed like an open-and-shut case. Carey was tried for first-degree murder, but the jury found her not guilty in a stunning turn of events.
"If she wanted to kill him, she wanted to do a kill shot — she was less than a foot away from him — she could have put it to his head or right behind his heart," her lawyer, Jared Stephenson, told Inside Edition. "The very first thing she does was call 911. You don’t call 911 if you want someone to die."
She said she didn’t have a choice, saying she got to the gun first because "it was me or him."
Carey's own attorney admits he believes she would have been found guilty if his client had been charged with second-degree homicide, which requires a jury to find there was reckless disregard for human life.
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