Kerri Ann Abatti left her husband a note when she moved from their family home in the California farming town of El Centro to a house they owned in Arizona’s White Mountains in August 2023.
About a month and a half later, court records show, she texted her husband, Mike Abatti — a wealthy farmer from one of the most prominent families in the Imperial Valley — that she was filing for divorce.
The divorce filings show the pair became embroiled in a contentious court battle. Kerri Ann accused Mike of stonewalling her attempts to learn the full picture of their income and real estate holdings while he made changes to their finances without consulting her or her attorney. Meanwhile, she contended, she was struggling to stay afloat on the several thousand dollars in monthly spousal support that the court temporarily awarded her as the proceedings stretched on for more than two years.
But then last month, a relative found Kerri Ann Abatti inside her cavernous Pinetop, Ariz., home on 14 wooded acres, suffering from a gunshot wound, said Chief Deputy Brian Swanty of the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office. Abatti died on the way to the hospital, he said.
There have been no arrests in Abatti’s killing, authorities said Friday. Detectives are working to rule out suspects and said they’re aware of the victim’s acrimonious divorce proceedings.
“We’re not sure if it’s involved or not,” Swanty said.
On Tuesday, detectives served search warrantson the Abattis’ El Centro home; vehicles and camp trailers belonging to the family; two structures on the Mike Abatti Farms property and electronic devices belonging to “a multitude of people,” Swanty said. Numerous pieces of potential evidence were seized, he said, but added that there was nothing he would consider to be “a smoking gun.”
Investigators, he said, will continue to cast a wide net to solve the case. “There are numerous things being looked at to try to find the truth and find facts and bring justice to this woman that was killed,” Swanty said.
Repeated attempts by The Times to reach Mike Abatti through his company and attorneys have been unsuccessful.
News of the case has shaken the tight-knit community in the Imperial Valley, a swath of irrigated desert that’s known as America’s winter salad bowl for its ability to support crops like leafy greens and onions when other regions are too cold and where the Abatti name holds a great deal of influence.
“It’s affected this community,” said Wally Leimgruber, a former Imperial County supervisor.
“The Abattis are such a large family,” he said. “This community knows that the Abatti family was one of the pioneers that came here.”
Leimgruber is a distant cousin of Mike Abatti. His grandmother was the sister of Mike’s maternal grandfather, John Studer, a prominent local farmer who in 1950 shot and killed his wife, Gertrude, after she filed for divorce, and then took his own life, according to an article in the Calexico Chronicle.
The family trace their roots to Battista and Antonia Abatti, Italian immigrants who started a dairy farm in Holtville, which neighbors El Centro, in the 1920s. Their sons, Ben and Tony, founded their own farm in 1956. They grew cantaloupe, onions, honeydew and asparagus, eventually cultivating 24,000 acres and employing 7,000 people, according to Ben Abatti’s obituary.
Ben Abatti had five children with his wife, Loretta. All of them went into farming, the obituary states.
Today, prominent members of the Abatti family include Mike’s brother, Jimmy Abatti, a onetime president of the Imperial County Farm Bureau who was recently honored with the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Brawley’s Branding Iron Award for his philanthropy. His other brother, Ben Abatti Jr., is on the board of the California Beet Growers Assn. and board president of the Holtville Unified School District.
Mike’s cousins Freddi Abatti runs a company providing hay and seed products, and Alex Abatti Jr. runs companies that manufacture fertilizer, package hay and market seed and grain.
Together, the Abattis are among the largest landowners in the Imperial Valley, managing operations on thousands of acres, growing crops that include alfalfa, broccoli and melons. They’re also among the region’s largest water users, in 2022 using more water than the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area, according to estimates by ProPublica.
In recent years, the family has been involved in legal disputes with the Imperial Irrigation District over water rights. Mike Abatti has accused the district of illegally limiting his water supply for irrigation and in 2021 took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the petition.
A lower court judge who initially ruled in Mike Abatti’s favor in that lawsuit had a history of business and social ties to multiple members of the Abatti family, according to the Desert Sun, which in 2018 published an investigation into the Abattis’ influence in the area.
In one instance in 2015, the investigation found, the Imperial Irrigation District passed over lower-cost bids to award one of Mike’s companies a $35-million contract to build a battery even though he had no previous energy experience. The district attorney tasked with scrutinizing the deal described Mike as a friend and employed an assistant district attorney who is married to his brother Jimmy, according to the report.
Mike married Kerri Ann in 1992, and the couple had three children. They enjoyed a high standard of living — traveling the world, eating out whenever they pleased, driving luxury vehicles and paying for private schools, court filings state. Kerri Ann filed for divorce in October 2023 after more than 31 years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences.
The 5,100-square-foot Pinetop property where she moved during the separation was close to her aging parents, court records state. But the home and its sprawling grounds had fallen into disrepair and needed new appliances, as well as fire hardening work to ensure it continued to qualify for homeowners insurance, she wrote in court filings.
The parties had initially agreed for Mike to pay Kerri Ann temporary spousal support of $5,000 a month, but it wasn’t enough for her to support herself and make the necessary repairs, she wrote in legal filings.
“I am barely scraping by each month,” she wrote.
Among her expenses were renting cars to travel to see her children or her lawyer in San Diego because the 2011 Cadillac Escalade she was driving had close to 275,000 miles on it and needed repairs, the filings state.
Kerri Ann had requested reasonable spousal support, which she estimated to be at least $30,000 a month. She hired experts to assess the couple’s extensive income from farms, rentals and other sources, as well as the value of their businesses and properties in California, Arizona and Wyoming, in a bid to determine exactly what she was entitled to, she wrote in court filings.
According to filings from Kerri Ann’s attorney, Mike had solely operated the couple’s businesses and managed most of the finances since 1999, when she stopped working to raise their children. She had little knowledge or access to their funds since then, she wrote.
Still, increasing her payments would not be a hardship for her husband, she argued. She alleged the parties’ farm income, which Kerri Ann could access only through Mike, was over $50,000 a month, the filings state. Mike’s gross monthly income was $178,135, Kerri Ann estimated in another filing.
Kerri Ann estimated a portion of their community property to be worth $2.6 million and that they bought their Wyoming land for $14.5 million, court filings state. The couple also owned extensive farmland in El Centro consisting of at least 38 parcels, which she could only estimate were worth millions more, she wrote.
“The Respondent has also now alleged that some of these are his separate property, but we lumped them all together, paid expenses and property taxes from our operations and always treated them as our joint properties,” Kerri Ann wrote in a declaration filed Jan. 3.
She alleged that Mike was continuing to travel, hunt, fish and spend tens of thousands of dollars on upgrades to some of those properties.
“I, on the other hand, am barely able to stay afloat with the limited support that I am receiving,” she wrote in the filing.
In another declaration filed Feb. 7, Kerri Ann wrote that she was “absolutely shocked and appalled” at changes she alleged her husband had made to “our community property business and finances since separation and probably shortly before separation.”
Large sums were used to pay down debts; contracts for new income that would ordinarily have been shared were signed and paid solely to Mike, “and overall we have struggled to get income information from him since the beginning,” she wrote.
“It appears that our community income has significantly dropped while his alleged separate property income has increased,” she wrote.
Soon after, the court ordered Mike to pay $35,000 to Kerri’s attorney; $10,000 to cover fire hardening expenses on the Pinetop property; and increased the temporary monthly spousal support to $6,400.
The court also ordered Mike to pay Kerri Ann 30% of any additional separate property income; to equally split any net community rental income or net profits from the farming operation with her; and to each month provide Kerri’s attorney with his bank statements, credit card statements and the general ledgers for his businesses.
The parties were next scheduled to meet at a hearing on Dec. 12.
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