Fort Hall man sentenced for assault on an officer
Raymond Hye Broncho, 40, of Fort Hall, Idaho, was sentenced Tuesday to 108 months in prison for assault on an officer with a dangerous weapon and illegal possession of a firearm by a drug user, U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson announced. Senior U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge also ordered Broncho to serve three years of supervised release, and to forfeit the guns involved in the incident. Broncho pleaded guilty on October 27, 2015.
According to the plea agreement, on September 20, 2014, Fort Hall Police officers were dispatched to a residence at 144 Lodge Pine on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation for a report of shots being fired. An officer arrived at the residence and found the door open and the house empty. Rifle-type spent shell casings were found near the front door. Additional officers heard yelling outside and saw Broncho holding an assault rifle in front of his body in a tactical position, as though he could raise the barrel and aim and shoot at any moment. The defendant was saying, “They’re in the trees” and “Watch out, they’re going to get me,” as though he saw other persons who weren’t really there. The officer ordered Broncho to drop the rifle multiple times, but Broncho ignored the commands. Eventually, Broncho went back into his house and shut the door.
Other officers assembled in the area and set up a perimeter on the house, surrounding it with officers and trying to negotiate with the defendant. An officer heard Broncho yell that he had a “head shot” on an officer. The officer thought it could have been her so she moved to another location and finally was positioned at the corner of a house near the Broncho residence. While there, five shots rang out and the bullets impacted the ground a few feet from where the officer was standing. Later investigators found that the second officer’s car had been hit by three bullets from the round of five shots.
The Bannock County and Federal Bureau of Investigations Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams arrived. While three members of the Bannock County SWAT team were positioned to watch the Broncho residence, Broncho began yelling. Then the Bannock County Sheriff’s SWAT team members heard a round fired from a deep-sounding rifle and they saw the round hit right in front of the position of the three officers. Another round was fired which hit the ground five to ten feet in front of the officers’ position.
The defendant surrendered to police later. Police took the defendant’s rifle, a SKS, Norinco assault rifle into custody. Police also found a .22 caliber rifle in the house, which they took into custody.
Broncho admitted that he possessed the firearms while he was an unlawful user of a controlled substance. He admitted to police officers that he had been using methamphetamine just before the shooting incident began and a blood test showed methamphetamine in the defendant’s body.
The case was investigated by the Fort Hall Police Department, the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
