Жительницу Джейнсвилла обвиняют в покупке оружия для преступника, который покончил с собой

JANESVILLE — A Janesville woman is charged with buying firearms for a felon after police say a man she knew fatally shot himself with a gun she’d bought for him in early August. A criminal complaint filed in Rock County says Lauren J. Brown, 29, of Janesville faces two counts of misdemeanor straw purchase of firearms after police say she twice bought guns for a man who on Aug. 9 fatally shot himself in the head with one of those guns. Police had already known Brown bought a gun for an unidentified man she said she was sometimes living with. Police said they found that weapon in his vehicle a month before his death. Police say the man had been involved in a crash, and policer responding found a.40-caliber handgun registered to Brown in the man’s car. Police believe Brown bought that gun for the man, even though his criminal history prevented him from legally owning one. He was convicted of attempting to disarm a police officer in 2023, alongside a bail jumping charge tied to the case. Police think Brown used her credit card to pay for a second, 9-mm handgun she and the man then picked up at a local gun shop, Mid-City Guns, Aug. 7, according to court documents. Brown indicated she and the man took the gun to a firing range to practice shooting it. Brown told police the man wanted the gun because he was “concerned for his safety,” according to the complaint. Two days, later, police said the man fatally shot himself with the while he was in Brown’s mobile home on the city’s west edge. Court documents say Brown told police she and the man had been drinking and smoking THC on Aug. 9, the day the man shot himself. The woman said she and the man were both upset that day over the recent death of their friend. Brown said she thinks the man pointed the gun at himself, but that she thought the shooting was an accident, because she believes the man did not know the gun had an active round in the chamber. The gun death was previously unannounced by police, but it came during a week in which Janesville police wrestled with other cases of gun violence. The date as a separate, triple-shooting homicide that happened in the early morning hours the same day, Aug. 9, in Janesville’s Fourth Ward neighborhood. That’s the shooting that left Milton man Jason Kaplan, 25, dead, and two others injured in a case that’s led to the arrest of five men. The criminal complaint does not indicate any ties between the two shootings. This article has been updated to clarify that police only cited Lauren Brown for the first of two straw purchases of handguns for a felon in August. That was after police learned Brown had bought a second gun via a second straw purchase, a gun police believe a felon used to shoot himself fatally.