| By Big Radio News Staff |
A man guilty of shooting another man while scattering bullets around Beloit’s Colley Road in 2023 will serve 22-and-a-half years behind bars.
Rock County Judge Ashley Morse handed a stiff sentence Wednesday — nearly the maximum punishment possible — for 28-year-old Phillip Fung Li of Fitchburg. Lee pleaded guilty of first degree reckless injury and first degree endangering safety in the shooting last August.
Court papers say Fung Li shot a man during an argument the man was having with another person, hitting the man in the thigh with a bullet as he was running away. He fired multiple shots, sending a bullet into a car and another through the window of a house.
The man testified in court from a phone call from where he now lives in Puerto Rico. The man testified through an interpreter, during a tropical storm that’s hitting Puerto Rico right now.
The man says he lost his job in Beloit after Fung Li shot him and had to move to Puerto Rico. He says Fung Li shot at him as he was running away, and that bullets were flying all over with children around.
The man says his wounded leg now constantly itches. He told the court Fung Li didn’t seem to care who was in the path of bullets he fired in what the man says was a moment of anger and disregard for another person’s life.
The man says Fung Li later called him from jail, and sent friends to threaten him in attempts to dissuade the man from testifying in court.
Prosecutors argued for a maximum sentence of 30 years prison. Rock County Assistant District Attorney Jason Sanders said a simple characterization of Fung Li would be to call him a “psychopath,” but Sanders says it’s not that simple.
Sanders points out Fung Li has a pattern of jumping into fights with deadly force, like when authorities say he slashed a jail inmate with a knife he made earlier this month as he awaited sentencing on the Beloit shooting.
Fung Li is suspected of trying to slash another inmate’s face with a makeshift blade made out of a razor. This was after jail guards say Fung Li drew a frowning face emoji in his own blood on the inmate’s cell window.
Authorities say later, when the inmate was coming out of his cell, Fung Li ran at him with the blade and slashed at the inmate, slicing an arm the inmate was using to guard his face.
Sanders says the suspected attack came because Fung Li was convinced the inmate had “snitched” to jailers that RECAP inmates were smuggling in drugs. Sanders says that’s a situation Fung Li would have had no involvement with.
He cast it as an example of how quickly and unpredictably Fung Li injects himself into arguments and jumps to deadly force.
Fung Li, speaking through an interpreter, shed tears while telling the court and everyone he harmed in the Beloit shooting that he is sorry he acted out of “ire.”
Fung Li’s attorney says he’d been severely abused and neglected as a child, including two times Fung Li says his mother “tried to kill him.”
His attorney argued for three years behind bars for Fung Li, saying Fung Li suffers severe, untreated emotional trauma from his childhood. The attorney suggested that’s part of what drives Fung Li to such quick anger and violence.
Morse says Fung Li shows a pattern of repeatedly having a “hair-pin trigger,” temperament, and that his outbursts of anger seem to be accompanied by him using deadly force.
Morse says the safety of others from Fung Li’s violent tendencies and the responsibility he bears for his own actions outweigh any personal wounds Fung Li might carry from childhood.