The second jury answered the question the first one could not. On Friday, November 6, a Lane County Circuit Court jury unanimously found Everett Scott Fuller, 57, guilty of first-degree manslaughter in the December 26, 2024 shooting of Christopher Lee “Bubba” Clark Jr., 32, at Prindel Creek Farm in remote northwest Lane County, Oregon — and not guilty of second-degree murder, the charge on which his first trial deadlocked in June. Fuller, who testified in his own defence at both trials, said he shot Clark in self-defence after Clark grabbed his leg and tried to pull him off an elevated platform onto a concrete floor. The jury, which heard four days of testimony in the retrial, rejected that claim as a defence to killing, while also declining to convict him of murder. Fuller will be sentenced on Thursday, November 12, in Lane County Circuit Court; first-degree manslaughter in Oregon carries a mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison.

Source: Lookout Eugene-Springfield — jury returns guilty verdict, Nov. 6, 2026

The setting matters to understanding how a darts game ended in a killing. Prindel Creek Farm, in the isolated Five Rivers area about 25 miles east of Yachats in the Oregon Coast Range, is a former tree farm where residents rent, or trade work for lodging, living in a house, a trailer or a yurt, according to trial testimony. Clark lived at the farm. So, part-time, did Christine Fuller — Everett Fuller's then-wife, who was in a romantic relationship with Clark and who divorced Fuller earlier this year. On the night after Christmas 2024, after a family Christmas meal the day before and a planned pie gathering that came apart when Christine arrived hours late and left quickly, Everett Fuller walked into the farm's recreation building, known as the Packing Shed, where Clark, Christine, Tyler Holloway and Amy Jewett had gathered around a pool table and dart board. Within about five minutes of Fuller walking in on the darts game, according to Christine Fuller's testimony, Clark was shot from a pistol Fuller pulled from his hoodie pocket.

Source: Lookout Eugene-Springfield — trial testimony coverage, Nov. 4–5, 2026

Self-defence, tested inch by inch

Fuller, a self-described pacifist, told jurors he fired “in self-preservation, in some kind of reflex”: he was seated in a rolling office chair in the Packing Shed's loft, roughly 5 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 8 inches above the floor, and testified that Clark grabbed his leg and pulled, sliding him out of the chair, and that he feared being dragged down onto the concrete. Deputy District Attorney Nicholas Geil attacked the physics of that account in closing, extending a tape measure to compare Clark's height — 5-foot-9, he said — with the platform's height and arguing Clark could not get the leverage to jerk a man out of the loft: “It doesn't make sense in terms of leverage.” Eyewitness Amy Jewett, one of four people in the shed, testified she did not see a leg grab — “Jewett says there wasn't; he says there was,” Geil told the jury. “But he's got a motivation to present a different story.” Defence attorney John Kolego countered that the only question was whether Fuller faced “an objectively reasonable fear,” that Fuller went to the shed out of concern about his wife's drinking rather than anger, and that expert testimony put Clark's blood-alcohol level at 0.139 — well above the 0.08 driving limit — describing Clark as “tuned up” and angry that his girlfriend had left. Kolego also pressed the inconsistencies in Jewett's account: she reported hearing two shots, while autopsy findings showed wounds from three, and a Lane County sheriff's detective testified there was no evidence in the shed of the additional shots Jewett described.

The emails the jury could not unhear

The prosecution's theory was that this was anger rehearsed long in advance. Geil read jurors emails Fuller sent his wife from Missouri, where he had temporarily moved in 2022 with the couple's younger son after learning of the relationship between Christine Fuller and Clark. “I gave my word to Bubba that if he ever tried to get you to touch him again, I would shoot him,” one email said. Another: “I don't see any way of facing him, except down a barrel while pulling the trigger. I must have been wrong about pacifism.” “You don't get to kill people because you don't like what's happening in your relationship,” Geil told the jury. “What we have here is a man who didn't get the result he wanted, and he wasn't willing to let it go.” Jurors in the retrial heard testimony over four days from, among others, Christine Fuller and the couple's two children, about the separation and the night of the shooting. The verdict — murder rejected, manslaughter unanimous — reads as a jury that did not accept the killing as justified self-defence, but also was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the intentional murder the state charged.

The first trial, and the second death that night

None of this was the case's first day in court. Fuller's first trial ended on June 4, 2026, when Lane County Circuit Judge Clara Rigmaiden declared a mistrial after three days of deliberations: the presiding juror told the court the jury was split 8–4, and told Lookout Eugene-Springfield afterwards that the eight favoured acquittal. Geil said then that Fuller would be tried a second time, and the retrial, before Judge Charles Zennaché, was reshaped by one procedural change: at Geil's request, jurors who acquitted on murder were instructed to consider first-degree manslaughter, and then, if necessary, criminally negligent homicide — the ladder of options the first jury never had. There is also a second, unresolved death woven through this case. Tyler Holloway, 26, the witness who called 911 from the Packing Shed, was himself fatally shot by police hours later as officers, delayed by the farm's remoteness, reached the property — Jewett testified she heard him curse, then a shot, then a “barrage” she at first believed was Fuller returning. Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa concluded the officers who shot Holloway bore no criminal responsibility; a wrongful-death lawsuit alleging negligence by an Oregon State Police sergeant and others remains pending.

Source: Lincoln Chronicle — Lane County judge declares mistrial in Five Rivers murder trial, June 2026

Why an Oregon farm case reaches our readers

Prindel Creek Farm is about as far from the Punjabi diaspora's American map as a story can sit — a work-trade farm commune in the Coast Range, 25 miles from the nearest town of any size. What travels is the legal shape of the case, because it is the shape of self-defence claims everywhere in the United States: a defendant who says he fired in reflex and fear; a prosecution answering with his own written words from two years earlier; a jury given a ladder of charges and choosing the middle rung. For immigrant families newer to the American court system — including the truckers and Central Valley and Pacific Northwest families who read this site — the case is a plain demonstration of how Oregon juries actually weigh a self-defence claim: the claim is judged on whether the fear was objectively reasonable, prior threats count heavily against it, and a shooting can be neither murder nor justified, but manslaughter — with a mandatory decade in prison attached.

What happens next

Sentencing is set for Thursday, November 12, in Lane County Circuit Court. Because first-degree manslaughter carries a mandatory 10-year sentence in Oregon, the hearing's open questions are narrower than in most cases — credit for time served and the precise terms the court enters — rather than the length itself, though Fuller retains the right to appeal the conviction. Second-degree murder, which the jury rejected, would have carried a minimum of 25 years. Separately, the wrongful-death lawsuit over Tyler Holloway's death continues, and it will revisit, in a civil courtroom, the police response to the same night this verdict closed in a criminal one.