Wichita man sentenced for 2020 shooting where victim was left to die on city street
A Wichita man last month received a more than 20-year prison sentence for the killing of a 27-year-old who was found dying on a street in a southeast Wichita neighborhood in August 2020.
Jurors in January convicted Donovan Harrington, 26, of voluntary manslaughter and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon by a convicted felon in the shooting death of Miguel A. Tapia. Originally, prosecutors charged Harrington with second-degree intentional murder and the weapons violations, to which he pleaded not guilty.
Sedgwick County District Judge Kevin Smith imposed a mid-range sentence — 233 months for the homicide and 8 months for each of the weapons violations — on March 16 and ordered that the terms be served consecutively, or back-to-back, according to a sentencing judgment filed in court last week.
The total sentence handed down was 249 months, or 20 years, 9 months in prison.
Police have said Harrington shot Tapia from the backseat of a stolen Nissan Pathfinder during an argument on Aug. 17, 2020. Harrington and two women who were in the car with the men left Tapia and the car in the 600 block of South Armour Dr., near Kellogg and Rock, before flagging down another driver, who gave them a ride to a nearby hotel.
Tapia was found around 7:30 a.m. and rushed to a hospital, where he died. Harrington was arrested and booked into the Sedgwick County Jail the next day.
Harrington’s court-appointed lawyer, Jama Mitchell, asked the court for leniency in a February motion for a departure sentence, writing that her client “is amenable to entering and successfully completing a drug treatment program” but that one “may not be available to him” due to budget cuts within the Kansas Department of Corrections.
“Therefore, the presumptive prison sentence in the case will not have the desired rehabilitative effect,” she wrote.
But the judge disagreed and ordered the prison term, according to court records. Harrington will receive credit for the time he spent in jail waiting for his case to resolve, a total of 575 days, records show.
This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 12:02 PM.
