He "stole our entire future." Shooter gets 29 years in prison for deadly Garland District road rage shooting

May 20-Leslie Paine was sitting with her husband, Joshua Paine, as they watched the news and finished their coffee the morning of May 23, 2024. She kissed him goodbye for work as she did on most weekdays for the past 24 years.

"There was nothing unusual about that morning," Leslie Paine said. "Nothing to warn me that within the next hour, my entire life would be shattered beyond repair."

Joshua Paine, 42, was shot and killed around 5:30 a.m. that day on the 700 block of West Garland Avenue as he was driving to his job as a clinical engineer in the biomedical field at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Leslie Paine described her shock and grief in a victim impact statement Tuesday to Spokane County Superior Court Judge Marla Polin before Polin sentenced the killer, 30-year-old Caleb N. Carder, to nearly 29 years in prison for the road-rage shooting.

Video footage from Quinn Advertising, located between Post and Wall streets, shows Paine driving his silver Honda Ridgeline down the road as a black 2014 Mercedes, driven by Carder, speeds up next to him and blocks the front of his car.

Carder jumps out of the car, and Paine opens his door as the two have a brief argument standing in the street. Carder walks up to Paine as he is standing next to his car and starts shooting at him, court records say.

The video footage appears to show Paine running away toward a nearby business as Carder points a gun at his back and fires. Paine is seen collapsing onto the sidewalk.

Carder eventually began CPR on Paine while on the phone with police after a delayed response.

When police arrived, they asked Carder "where the shooter went," and he indicated he was the shooter, court records say.

Carder shot Paine nine times before Paine collapsed, according to a Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney's Office news release.

"At any point Caleb could have called for assistance, stopped his vehicle, or turned the other direction," Detective Chan Erdman wrote in an affidavit. "... No evidence has been found that Joshua Paine did anything to initiate such a violent reaction from Caleb Carder."

Several family members and friends of Joshua Paine shared victim impact statements with the court totaling 54 pages. Leslie Paine was one of them.

She said she learned of the shooting on Spokane News and noticed her husband's truck at the scene of the shooting.

"In that moment, my body went numb," she said. "Then it began violently shaking. I knew my husband didn't carry a gun, so we were on the wrong side of this."

She confirmed her husband's location by pinging his Apple Watch. She called him repeatedly, and despite always answering, he didn't that morning. Leslie Paine said she and her daughter drove to the scene "where our lives changed forever."

"It was my husband murdered in broad daylight by a complete stranger who showed no regard for human life, no regard for the families nearby, and no regard for the devastation he would leave behind," she said. "In that moment, a part of me died too. My person is gone!"

She said she relives the moment of pulling up to the scene where she collapsed from "unbearable grief and shock." That day carries a level of trauma she will never fully escape, but people who experience tragic loss do not speak about the every single day that follows.

"They do not speak about the silence that fills a house when the person who gave it life never comes home again," she said. "The empty side of the bed you still reach for in the middle of the night while holding onto his pillow and sobbing because some part of you still cannot accept he is gone."

She said she wears his wedding ring around her neck as well as a locket with the first and last picture the couple ever took together. She said she lives with panic attacks and nightmares since the shooting.

"The image of EMTs desperately trying to save Josh in that video replays in my mind constantly," she said. "I replay the horror of his final moments seen on the news, the fear he must have felt as he was hunted through the street, running for his life, suffering unimaginable pain, screaming for help while the person responsible showed him no mercy."

She said Carder "stole our entire future."

"Instead of planning our future, I am learning how to survive without the person I built my entire life beside since I was 15 years old," she said.

Joshua Paine was an intelligent, outgoing and fun-loving person, she said. He was incredibly knowledgeable about every subject and the best trivia partner anyone could ask for. He loved summers at the lake and cooking his famous BBQ chicken. In the winter, he loved to snowboard and ride snowmobiles.

"He filled every room with energy, laughter, chaos, warmth, and life," she said.

He loved deeply and was deeply loved, evidenced by more the more than 350 people who attended his funeral.

She and other loved ones asked Polin to impose the maximum sentence allowed, which was life in prison.

The anger, grief and trauma experienced by Leslie Paine was shared by other family members.

Shayla Paine, the couple's only child, said her father won't be able to walk her down the aisle at her wedding and meet her future children. In the last two years, he's already missed her two college graduations and 21st birthday.

"He took all those opportunities away for what?" she said. "My dad did nothing to him."

Bert Arnold, Joshua Paine's father, was also notified by the news of the shooting. He then immediately got a call from Leslie Paine saying the man shot was his son.

"One moment I was living my life, and the next I was being told my son had been murdered," Arnold said in his impact statement.

Later that evening, a news broadcast showed video footage leading up to the shooting.

"And there it was ... my son's last moments alive right on my big screen in my living room," he said. "No parent should ever learn the details of their child's last moments from a television screen."

He said he has not been the same man and never will.

"There is a particular cruelty in outliving your child," Arnold said.

He addressed his extreme anger for Carder, saying he took his son's life "over a moment of traffic."

"The grief he has caused my family is something I would not wish upon my worst enemy," Arnold said. "Not on anyone. Not even the defendant. It is a pain so total that I sometimes can't understand how I am still standing under the weight of it."

Lori Paine, Joshua Paine's mother, said the last two years have been devastating because of the loss of her only child. She just spent her second Mother's Day without him. She has nightmares and can't sleep or eat.

"He has taken the most precious and important person to me in the entire world," she said. "He has turned my life upside down and into shambles."

Several family members and friends spoke on Carder's behalf. One friend said Carder was not impulsive or reckless by nature and this was an "isolated and extreme situation."

"To the outside world, he may be defined by the charge he now faces," said Benjamin Budge, Carder's brother. "However, in our adult life, he is defined by his loyalty to his family, and giving spirit."

Budge said his brother is thoughtful and had some difficult life circumstances handed to him that he was trying to come to terms with.

"He is a good man who has simply made a tragic error," Budge said in his statement.

Carder addressed the court and apologized to the family, expressing his regret and begging their forgiveness, the prosecuting attorney's office release said. Polin said the killing was one of the most egregious, horrific and senseless acts she's seen.

Carder, who has no prior felony convictions, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder last month, according to court documents.

Carder's sentencing range was 20 to nearly 27 years, plus a two-year deadly weapon enhancement. Polin sentenced Carder to the high end of the range.

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