A prominent California farmer was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of fatally shooting his estranged wife in a remote mountain community in Arizona, the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office said.
Michael Abati, 63, was arrested in El Centro and booked into jail on first-degree murder charges. He is awaiting extradition to Arizona.
Authorities say they believe he drove to Arizona on Nov. 20 and shot 59-year-old Kerry Ann Abatti before returning home to California. She was found dead at her family’s tree-lined vacation home in Pinetop, Arizona, where she had moved after separating from her husband.
Michael Abati’s attorneys said in a statement Wednesday that he “has dedicated himself to his family, his work and his community” and that he will plead not guilty.
His lawyers said they are “deeply concerned” about his health, as he suffers from multiple medical conditions that require constant treatment and special care.
Authorities searched his home in far Southern California on December 2 as part of an investigation into his wife’s death.
El Centro is a city of 44,000 people just minutes from the Mexican border in the crop-rich Imperial Valley, which is the largest user of Colorado River water and is known for growing leafy greens, melons and forage crops.
Michael Abati comes from a long line of farmers in the area bordering Arizona, and his grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was among the area’s early settlers. His father, Ben, helped start the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, and the Abatti name is known throughout the region and is associated with agricultural enterprises, scholarship funds, and leadership in local boards and groups.
Michael Abbatti grows onions, broccoli, melons and other crops in the Imperial Valley and served on the board of the powerful Imperial Irrigation District from 2006 to 2010.
Michael and Kerry Abati were married in 1992 and had three children.
Kerry Abati is a descendant of one of the first Latter-day Saint families to settle in Pinetop in the 1880s. The community, located 190 miles northeast of Phoenix in the White Mountains, was briefly called Penrodville, named for Carey’s ancestors, before adopting the name Pinetop.
The couple separated in 2023 and Kerry Abati filed for divorce in divorce proceedings that were pending in California at the time of his death.
The couple had been feuding over money, with Carey telling the court that the couple had lived an upper-class lifestyle during more than three decades of marriage. He owned a large house in California, a vacation home in Pinetop and ranch land in Wyoming, he said, and he vacationed in Switzerland, Italy and Hawaii while sending his children to private school.
After the split, Carey was paid $5,000 a month in temporary spousal support, but last year she asked for a $30,000 increase, saying she could not maintain her standard of living since she left her job as a bookkeeper and office manager for the family farm in 1999 to stay home with the couple’s three children. Court filings show Carey, who previously held a real estate license in Arizona, also sought an additional $100,000 in attorney fees.
“I am barely making ends meet every month, handling all the manual labor on our large property in Arizona and maintaining it,” she wrote in court filings earlier this year. She also said that she is living with her elderly parents. Kerry said he also needs to buy a new car because his 2011 car has over 280,000 miles on it and is in desperate need of repairs.
Michael Abatti said in a legal filing that he could not afford the increase after two poor farming years hit his monthly income. He said an unusually cold and wet winter was to blame, along with European shifts in crop-buying to support war-ravaged Ukrainian farmers and rising shipping costs.
He said it cost $1,000 to grow an acre of wheat in mid-2024, which he could sell for $700, and he was getting about $22,000 a month to run the farm as the business struggled to pay its creditors in full.
“The available income at this time does not warrant any increase in the amount agreed upon by the parties, let alone an increase to $30,000 per month,” Lee Hejmanowski, Michael Abatti’s family law attorney, wrote in court papers.
A few days later, Michael Abati agreed to increase temporary spousal support payments to $6,400 a month, court filings show.
According to “The Morality of Deceit,” a 2023 book on water issues written by his college friend Craig Morgan, he studied in the agribusiness management program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins before returning to California.
Morgan writes in the book that in 2009, Michael Abati nearly died from an infection caused by flesh-eating bacteria and was hospitalized and placed in a medically induced coma for treatment.
