SLO County man shot marbles at cars for nearly a year. Now he faces 15 years in prison
A Nipomo man accused of using a slingshot and marbles to fire on motorists in 2019 pleaded guilty last week to 30 counts of felony assault in Monterey County.
Charles Kenneth Lafferty was charged in connection to more than 70 alleged attacks over nearly a year along freeways in Monterey and San Benito counties between February 2019 and his arrest in January 2020.
As investigators in multiple counties searched for a suspect, a stretch of Highways 101 and 156 near Prunedale came to be known as “Projectile Alley.”
Though most of the motorists were uninjured, six people — including a child, according to the CHP — in the targeted vehicles suffered cuts and scrapes as a result of being hit with broken glass. No collisions were linked to the attacks.
According to KSBW-TV in Monterey County, one of the vehicles struck was a Carmel High School bus carrying 20 members of the football team to a game in San Jose.
Lafferty, 54, is a resident of Nipomo but also has ties to Monterey County, according to the KSBW-TV report.
He was in Monterey Superior Court on Thursday to plead guilty to 28 counts of assault with a deadly weapon and two additional counts of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.
Those last two counts are the result of Lafferty shooting a marble at two CHP officers in a marked patrol vehicle as the officers were responding to an earlier projectile incident, the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release. Neither officer was injured.
Under terms of his plea, Lafferty will receive a sentence of 15 years in state prison when he’s sentenced on June 29.
Lafferty was identified as a suspect when his vehicle was tied to the scene of several of the reported incidents, and the DA’s Office says a “detailed digital forensic analysis” linked Lafferty to more than 50 incidents reported to CHP.
CHP officers arrested Lafferty at his Nipomo home on Jan. 22, 2020. Police seized a slingshot, a slingshot replacement band, and 55 marbles from Lafferty’s vehicle on the day of his arrest.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office says Lafferty admitted to repeatedly shooting marbles at traffic with the slingshot but would not provide an exact number of times he did so.
He also would not disclose a motive for his actions, the DA’s Office said.
