photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A Lawrence Police Department patrol vehicle is pictured June 28, 2022.

A 22-year-old Lawrence man told police that he consumed six shots of hard liquor at a pool hall just before he got into a small car with six other young men, pulled a gun from his pants pocket and shot a man sitting in the front seat, critically injuring him.

That’s according to a recently released police affidavit in support of the arrest of Coby Allen Gore Holland, who has since been charged with aggravated battery and unlawful discharge of a firearm in city limits. Allegations in arrest affidavits have not been proved in court.

“I was drunk,” he reportedly told police afterward, describing the Feb. 19 shooting as an accident but also acknowledging that “it was my fault.”

At his first court appearance two days later, Gore Holland described the 23-year-old shooting victim as his good friend. However, Gore Holland was not among the three men who escorted the critically injured man to LMH Health and stayed until police arrived, according to the affidavit.

Instead, Gore Holland went home and told his girlfriend, “I shot my friend, I’m going to prison,” according to the affidavit. He was not forthcoming about what he did with the gun — a 9mm Glock style “Shadow Systems, Elite” — but according to the affidavit, his girlfriend located the weapon in his minivan and turned it over to police.

Police also searched the residence — with consent, they said — and found a 9mm shell casing in the garage, which the girlfriend confirmed as having come from the firearm after it discharged into the victim. They also located a blood-stained shirt on the garage floor, they said.

Police indicated that the gun, when given to them, was unloaded and had no magazine attached.

When asked about that, Gore Holland reportedly said he did not know what happened to the missing ammunition and believed that the weapon should still have been loaded.

According to the affidavit, however, another man who was in the car told police that after the gun fired Gore Holland said, “I thought it was unloaded.”

The late-night ride in a Kia Optima came to the attention of police when they were dispatched to LMH Health concerning a patient who had just arrived after being shot in the car at the Casey’s at 1703 W. Sixth St. Some of the men in the car told police that the victim had been sitting in the front seat when Gore Holland shot him from the back seat by accident.

One of the men told police that Gore Holland had been “racking” his gun right before the incident. Racking refers to manually pulling back the slide or the cocking handle of a firearm and releasing it quickly.

The man said he disliked that activity and told Gore-Holland to stop doing that — “Don’t rack that [f-ing] gun,” he said — then he put his hand on the weapon and pushed it away so that Gore-Holland would stop pointing it at people. The man said he then heard a loud bang near his head and learned that a passenger in the front had been shot.

“I’m shot, I’m shot,” the victim said, according to another man in the packed car who had been riding on the floorboard in front of the victim.

Gore Holland, however, told police that he was racking the gun and that somehow the driver of the Kia bumped him from the front seat, prompting the weapon to fire.

He “was not able to articulate or explain in detail how or why this ‘bump’ happened,” police said in the affidavit.

The car reportedly belongs to the shooting victim’s mother, though the victim was not driving. When the car was located by police, they said they found another semi-automatic handgun in the front seat that was not involved in the shooting. One of the men found with the car said that he had been in the car when the shooting occurred, but he declined to speak to police without an attorney.

The police affidavit, citing a medical report, indicated that the victim had been shot in the left triceps; the bullet then traveled into the left side of his body, striking his stomach, liver, spleen and spine, requiring several surgeries.