A Spartansburg man who shot and killed his neighbor last year was sentenced to two to five years in state prison back in December.

That sentence will stand in the wake of a challenge litigated before President Judge Maureen Skerda on Friday.

Haggar S. Brewer was sentenced on a count of involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Victor Van Tassel III during a March 2021 dispute. His attorney, Robert Kinnear, pointed to statements made at sentencing that his client went to the victim’s house for a fight which, he asserted, was “not accurate to the case at hand.”

Kinnear said Van Tassel had a brain abnormality and was using methamphetamine and that his client was out by his garden when the situation unfolded.

Kinnear said at sentencing that Brewer took a “gun to a fistfight…. My client was facing a bigger man…. He stands by what he had to do given his medical condition.”

District Attorney Rob Greene suggested that “defense counsel is confused and not the victims” in that the altercation that resulted in the killing “wasn’t even near his garden” but was “extremely close” to the victim’s home.

Kinnear’s version of events was “not at all what happened,” Greene emphasized, calling it “absolutely inaccurate” that Brewer was just tending his garden.

Skerda said the location of the body was not “salient” in her decision making process.

She said Green’s office “aptly” analyzed the case and believed involuntary manslaughter to be the most appropriate plea.

“That does not negate that someone died here,” she said, calling a two-year sentence light in view of the fatality.

The sentence handed down included incarceration from between 24 to 60 months.

“That’s perfectly appropriate here,” she said, suggesting that a lesser sentence would, in her view, make it seem like the crime went unpunished.

Brewer did not participate in Friday’s hearing but he did speak briefly at sentencing.

“I did not intend Mr. Van Tassel to die,” Brewer said at sentencing. “I am very sorry that he’s gone. He was becoming my friend.”