Man gets 5 years for pulling gun

A man will spend up to five years at the Utah State Prison after pulling a gun when Salt Lake County sheriff's deputies approached him as part of Nevada missing person investigation.

Third District Judge Ann Boyden emphasized that she was only sentencing Juan Carlos Tellez, who is a Mexican citizen on hold for deportation and who appeared with a Spanish interpreter, for his run-in with the Salt Lake deputies and not for his possible involvement in the Nevada case.

Boyden called the Salt Lake incident "so egregious" and "a highly dangerous situation. They faced a gun. You drew a gun on those officers," she said to Tellez.

The deputies were helping with a Carson City, Nev., investigation of the disappearance of 33-year-old Bertha Anguiano, whose 3-year-old son was found alone in a grocery store, stained with blood and saying that Tellez had hit his mother in the head with a wooden object and pushed her from a truck.

Carson City authorities said a test on the bloodstain showed that it was from a female related to the boy but would not elaborate.

Nevada authorities have not yet found Anguiano or her body.

Tellez and acquaintance Joaquin Barcelo were arrested Nov. 21 in Salt Lake County after Tellez allegedly pulled a gun from his waistband as deputies approached him.

An officer hit him with an unmarked car before any shots were fired, court documents state.

Tellez pleaded not guilty to two counts of third-degree felony aggravated assault, one count of third-degree felony possession of a weapon by a restricted person and class A misdemeanor carrying a concealed dangerous weapon. In March, a jury convicted him of all the charges except one of the aggravated assault counts.

The two zero-to-five-year prison sentences and one zero-to-one-year sentence she handed out will run concurrently. Boyden agreed with defense attorney Raymond Shuey's argument that the three charges were all part of one single criminal episode.

She said the fact that the jury acquitted him of the second aggravated assault charge, which accused him of intentionally endangering another deputy, was vital to her single-episode finding and suggested the sentences might run consecutively had he been found guilty on all charges.

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