MARTINEZ — A Contra Costa man has been charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor in a District Attorney investigation that started when authorities discovered the defendant had been allowed to take gun parts and bullets from a county sheriff gun range, court records show.
John Michael King was charged with two counts of assault weapon possession and one count of illegally manufacturing a firearm, and is out of custody on a $200,000 surety bond, court records show. The charges were filed in May, and King is next due in court in August.
King, a volunteer with the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office, was allowed to take thousands of gun parts and ammunition from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s gun range on Marsh Creek Road in unincorporated Clayton, for “well over a decade.” The sheriff’s office launched an internal affairs investigation after King’s ex-wife tipped off investigators, but the probe found no criminality and produced no written findings. A lieutenant testified in King’s divorce that he recommended civilians no longer be allowed to take gun parts and ammunition from the range, since it defied “common sense,” according to court records.
But when the Contra Costa District Attorney was made aware of the practice in early 2022, it launched a criminal investigation, seized more than 100 firearms believed to be King’s, and took roughly 20 other items, including sheriff’s department evidence bags — with case numbers as recent as 2019 — full of ammunition, kits for manufacturing guns and a Contra Costa Sheriff’s badge. DA investigators were investigating the possibility that King was making unserialized guns with parts he’d been allowed to take from the gun range, and found one homemade gun with no serial number, according to an inspector’s sworn statement.
King has not yet entered a plea.
When questioned about his gun collection during 2020 divorce proceedings, King invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. He described many of the parts as “garbage” and denied being “some kind of guns dealer,” but said he had sold some gun parts online. In emails, he asked a sheriff employee to be on the lookout for “savage rifles, barrels and bolts,” adding that he and the sheriff’s gun range master wanted to build some, according to court transcripts.
The lieutenant who investigated the matter for the sheriff’s internal affairs department testified he looked around the garage where King’s guns were stashed and didn’t see anything “overtly illegal,” he testified in 2020. Both allegedly illegal assault weapons, as well as the suspected ghost gun, were found by DA inspectors who searched the same garage two years later, court records show. Source: www.mercurynews.com