Prosser mom found guilty of murdering her best friend. It didn’t take jurors long
A Prosser mother was convicted Monday of shooting and killing her best friend after a night of drinking.
The Benton County jury deliberated for less than three hours, Prosecutor Andy Miller said in a Facebook post.
Amy S. Brown, 38, didn’t dispute that she shot Amanda Hill twice in the torso. But she told jurors last week it was in self defense.
The two women and their boyfriends were celebrating Brown’s 36th birthday in February 2018 by drinking in a camper on Brown’s property until after midnight.
At some point, Brown’s fiancé went inside the house to get some sleep. Hill, 35, followed some time later to use the bathroom, according to investigators.
Brown told detectives she went inside and found the two together.
Later, she and Hill started fighting and she felt like Hill tried to choke her, before Brown got away and retrieved her gun from her car.
A video of her interview with Benton County sheriff’s detectives soon after the shooting was played for jurors.
“I grabbed it and I pulled it out and I was like, ‘Get off of me,’ and she wouldn’t get off of me and so I fired,” said Brown.
“I fired two shots and when I fired two shots, she was, ‘Amy, what the f---? Are you serious?’ Brown said in her video interview. “And I was, ‘Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.’ And then I noticed that she was bleeding.”
The mother of two sons was holding her dying friend, trying to stop the bleeding, when emergency crews arrived.
Hill’s son was 13 when she died.
Brown’s second-degree murder trial started Feb. 24. Closing arguments were Monday morning.
Miller congratulated deputy prosecutors Andrew Howell and Brandon Pang, who handled the case.
“A huge thank you also goes out to Detective Lee Cantu and the rest of the Benton County Sheriff’s Office for their hard work investigating this crime,” he wrote.
Brown, who had been out of jail pending her trial, was booked into the Benton County jail after the verdict. Bail is set at $350,000.
She faces 10 years to about 18 years in prison.
This story was originally published March 9, 2020 at 6:12 PM.