A Virginia man was sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime and firearms charges Thursday, after pleading guilty to shooting two men because he suspected they were migrants from outside the United States.
Douglas Wayne Cornett, 59, had told detectives that he was angry undocumented migrants were receiving resources from the government, according to court records, and had fantasized about shooting undocumented migrants at the border from a helicopter to deter people from “attempting to cross the border.” He pleaded guilty in June.
“No one in this country should be hunted down and shot at because of who they are or where they come from,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in a press release.
Cornett’s lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment.
The shooting occurred on the night of Feb. 28, 2024, according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Omar Guandique was driving a white box truck on Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County, when Cornett began trailing him in a blue Honda Pilot. Guandique called a friend at a commercial fueling station to tell him he was being followed, hoping that his friend, who spoke English, could talk to the driver.
Guandique stopped at the station, with Cornett following him.
Security footage captured a brief exchange between the friend and Cornett, who wore a cowboy hat and was armed with a loaded 9mm handgun. Cornett drove away but waited close by for Guandique to leave, documents show. The friend called a buddy, who happened to be at a different gas station nearby, telling him that Guandique was on his way and was being followed.
When Guandique arrived at the second gas station, Cornett pulled up to the opposite side of the pump he was using. Jesus Martinez, tipped off by Guandique’s friend, walked over to Cornett’s vehicle and asked why he was following Guandique.
Cornett didn’t answer his question, court documents said, but responded with his own: How long had Guandique been in the United States?
Martinez asked Guandique, who responded, a year and a half.
Then Cornett, who is White, pulled out the 9mm handgun and fired six rounds. Guandique was shot twice in the stomach and once in the arm. Martinez was shot once in the stomach. Both men, who are Latino, were left with permanent injuries, prosecutors wrote in court filings.
After the shooting, court documents said, Cornett fled the scene and drove to his home in Ruther Glen, where he told the two people he lived with “he had just shot two men.” He was arrested and questioned by police the next day, where he told detectives about wanting to shoot undocumented migrants at the border.
Cornett’s defense later called a forensic neuropsychologist, court records show, who diagnosed him with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and said his proclivity to impulsivity and hyperactivity may have impacted his judgment the night of the shooting.
But when he was interviewed by police, prosecutors asserted, Cornett told detectives, “My intentions were clear in my brain, at that time.”
The people Cornett lived with described him as a “heavy consumer of cable television news,” who grew obsessed with news stories about undocumented migrants coming into the U.S., according to court documents. Cornett also struggled with substance abuse, including alcoholism, which, his defense said, “grew out of control in the year before his arrest.”
Cornett was already serving a life sentence at the Rappahannock Regional Jail for state hate crime and gun charges he incurred for the same shooting. While at the facility, he was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, a condition prosecutors and Cornett’s defense said would be best treated if he serves the rest of his time in federal custody.
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