Manas Moole Reddy, the UC Irvine student and Jason Mantzoukas lookalike* arrested last month for carrying a loaded weapon on campus, pleaded guilty Friday to the charges against him.
The 28-year-old was immediately sentenced to 40 days in jail but because he has been behind bars since Nov. 18, he is scheduled to be released today.
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Manas Moole Reddy, UCI Student, Accused of Possessing Loaded Gun on Campus
“He's going to get out … and get some help,” Reddy's defense attorney Michael Molfetta told City News Service. “He was severely depressed at the time. … He doesn't present a danger to anybody. He wasn't targeting anybody and he sure as heck wasn't going to
shoot anybody, but it was alarming behavior.”
Around 3 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 18, a female student saw Reddy standing near a tree just north of Steinhaus Hall Service Road on the campus and clutching a firearm with his left hand inside an open shoulder bag across the front of his chest. The UCI Police Department was contacted, and Reddy was later arrested for having the revolver on campus loaded with six bullets. He'd been held in lieu of $100,000 bail since.
Besides the retroactive jail time, Reddy was sentenced to three years of formal probation after copping to possessing a loaded gun on a college campus, unlawful possession of a gun and possession of ammunition by a prohibited person, all felonies.
*Hat tip to Misty Misty
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.