A prominent farmer in Southern California was arrested on Tuesday on charges that he fatally shot his wife, who had filed for divorce and was living apart from him in Arizona, the authorities said.
The man, Michael Abatti, 63, was arrested in El Centro, Calif., after an Arizona grand jury indicted him on charges that he murdered his wife, Kerri Ann Abatti, 59, last month at their second home in Pinetop, Ariz.
Mr. Abatti is well known in California’s Imperial Valley, an agricultural region that borders Mexico. He said in court records that his family had been farming in the valley for more than a century and that his grandfather had helped to build the All-American Canal, which brings water to the region from the Colorado River.
He and Ms. Abatti, who had three young adult children, separated in August 2023, after more than 31 years of marriage, and she filed for divorce that October, according to court records.
After the separation, Ms. Abatti moved out of their home in El Centro to their second home on 14 acres in Pinetop, a small community in Arizona’s White Mountains, she said in court records.
She said in an April 2024 court filing that she had “virtually no money to pay my monthly expenses,” and that Mr. Abatti “controlled all of our funds and essentially gave me a very small monthly allowance when we still resided together.” She said he had agreed to pay her temporary spousal support of $5,000 a month, which “barely covers my expenses on the Pinetop property.”
The divorce was pending in California on Nov. 20, when the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona said it responded to a 911 call and found that Ms. Abatti had been fatally shot at the home in Pinetop.
On Dec. 2, detectives executed search warrants at homes, properties, vehicles and camp trailers associated with the Abatti family in El Centro, and seized a “a significant amount of evidence” that led them to identify Mr. Abatti as a suspect, the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
The statement did not describe the evidence but said it led investigators to believe that Mr. Abatti had traveled on Nov. 20 from California to Pinetop, where he shot Ms. Abatti, and then immediately returned to California.
On Tuesday, detectives testified before a Navajo County grand jury and obtained an indictment and an arrest warrant for Mr. Abatti, who was taken into custody in El Centro later that day, the sheriff’s office said.
He was booked into the Imperial County Jail on first-degree murder charges, and was awaiting extradition to Arizona, the office said. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Abatti had a lawyer.
Ms. Abatti had deep roots in Pinetop, which was founded in the 1880s by her ancestors, who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Los Angeles Times reported. Ms. Abatti grew up in the town and, in high school, was a violinist, a cheerleader and the student body president, and she was named Miss Navajo County, The Times reported.
Before she married Mr. Abatti, she said in court filings, she had worked as a firefighter and an emergency medical technician and had a real estate license. After they married, she said, she had done bookkeeping for the farming business until 1999, when Mr. Abatti hired an outside person for the job. After that, her “sole purpose became being a parent and managing domestic duties,” she wrote.
Mr. Abatti and his farming business cultivated about 7,000 acres in the Imperial Valley, growing grains, alfalfa, broccoli, sugar beets, melons and other crops, according to a 2022 lawsuit he filed against the Imperial Irrigation District.
The Palm Springs Desert Sun reported in 2018 that Mr. Abatti had also built a second career in the energy industry by winning tens of millions of dollars in publicly funded energy contracts from the Imperial Irrigation District, on whose board of directors he once served.
Mr. Abatti said in a filing in February that he had been complying with his payments to Ms. Abatti since she left him, but that it would be difficult to pay her more. He pointed to rising shipping costs and European efforts to buy more Ukrainian grain, which he said had hurt the price of grain grown in other countries.
In a statement, David M. Clouse, the Navajo County sheriff, thanked the police agencies in California that helped in the investigation and the grand jurors, “who heard the evidence and concluded that an indictment was appropriate in this case, helping to bring justice to the Abatti family.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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