Omaha Paraprofessional James Fairbanks Shot Registered Offender Mattieo Condoluci Seven Times and Drew 40 to 70 Years

OMAHA, NEBRASKA — James Fairbanks did not wait for detectives to find him. Days after Mattieo Condoluci was found dead in a rental near 43rd and Pinkney, Fairbanks sent Omaha newsrooms an email that opened like a press release and closed like a manifesto. He named the date, May 14, 2020, around 9:45 p.m. He named the man. He named the registry page he had read while hunting for an apartment. He wrote that Condoluci had been convicted twice of molesting children and had served about two years. Then he wrote that he had ended it.

Fairbanks was 44, a former Omaha Public Schools paraprofessional, a divorced father of two boys. Condoluci was 64, convicted in Florida in 1994 and again in Sarpy County in 2007. Prosecutors in the Nebraska case had labeled him a dangerous sex offender even after his 2009 release. For a stretch he preached and cut hair for people living on Omaha streets. Fairbanks told police and later a reporter that he had seen Condoluci watching children, that he went to the door to warn him off the block, and that Condoluci rushed him. Prosecutors said he arrived with a gun and fired seven rounds from a 9mm, including a shot to the temple. Deputy County Attorney Brenda Beadle called it an assassination by a man who wanted the publicity.

Laura Smith had spent more than twenty years living with what Condoluci did to her five-year-old son. She renamed her Facebook group “Free James Fairbanks” and pushed an online petition for a pardon. Amanda Henry, Condoluci’s daughter, told local television that her father had raped her repeatedly and that she backed the shooter. At the July 2021 sentencing she told Judge Russell Bowie she wished the term were shorter, arguing the killing would never have happened if the courts had buried her father the first time. Joseph Condoluci, the son, rejected that bargain. He said his father’s record did not license a stranger to empty a magazine into the living room, and he objected that Fairbanks had been allowed to plead off a first-degree murder count.

Fairbanks sat for a World-Herald interview after the arrest and said a jury would understand. He was wrong about the forum. In April 2021 he pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and use of a weapon to commit a felony. A no-contest plea accepts the punishment without a confession the defendant can later walk back. Beadle noted the deal also erased an appeal and any chance a panel of twelve might nullify the charge. On July 14, 2021, Bowie stacked 30 to 50 years on the murder count and 10 to 20 on the gun count, concurrent, 40 to 70 in the headline. Credit for 421 days. Nebraska good-time math cuts most of that in half. Parole eligibility lands on May 18, 2040. Mandatory release, if parole never comes, is August 22, 2052. He is at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

Led out in leg irons, Fairbanks told a reporter he regretted what he had done to his own family. Asked whether he regretted killing Condoluci, he said he did, then stalled when pressed on whether the regret was for the dead man or for the sons who now visit a prison. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said. That sentence is the whole case in one shrug. He had scouted the public registry and, prosecutors said, mapped a route that could have taken him to a second listed offender. He chose one door.

Vigilante files always split the same way. One camp reads the registry and sees a state that released a man it had already called dangerous. The other camp reads the charging statute and sees a school employee who appointed himself the penalty phase. Both camps are looking at the same seven holes in the same body. The court picked the statute. Related cases on this desk include a U.K. mother who killed a pedophile, child sex offenders stabbed in U.K. prisons, and the Hiding in Plain Sight investigation. More under Crime News and U.S. News.