"He fractured his baby stepson's skull," Christensen says.
Kelley accepted a deal, pleading guilty to a charge of assault on his wife and to a charge of "intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm" on the child, Christensen says. His crimes were punishable by up to five years confinement (the military equivalent of a prison term). As part of the deal, Kelley received an 18-month cap on his confinement and was ultimately sentenced to 12 months.
Kelley's punitive discharge — a bad conduct discharge — did not prohibit him from owning a gun, as a dishonorable discharge would have.
But under federal law, anyone convicted of "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year" is prohibited from possessing a firearm. The same is true for anyone convicted of "a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence" under a provision that allows no exception for the military or law enforcement.
An official at the Pentagon tells NPR's Tom Bowman that a mistake resulted in neither the arrest nor the conviction being listed in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the database that would have flagged him as ineligible to purchase a firearm.
"This was mishandled by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where Kelley was serving when he was arrested," Tom reports. "An investigation is now underway, and the Air Force is taking it very seriously, said the source."
Kelley purchased four guns over a four-year period, according to federal officials; all those purchases were made after his court-martial conviction.
NPR's Martin Kaste reports that Academy Sports & Outdoors, a store that sold Kelley guns, says it ran a background check on Kelley twice in the past two years. Kelley passed each time, the company says.
If Kelley's convictions were never uploaded into the system, that could easily explain how he passed. But even if they had been uploaded, there might still have been trouble getting information into the right hands — there's a sort of language barrier between military and civilian justice systems, Christensen says, with different terms for the same kinds of crimes. If the military described a general court-martial for assault, with sentence of one year, the civilian authorities might "never realize" it was a domestic violence conviction punishable by five years, he says.