A state jury deliberated just four hours before finding Joshua Gonda not guilty yesterday in a 2008 freeway shooting that left a 16-year-old boy paralyzed from the chest down.

Gonda, 21, was facing one count of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of attempted second-degree murder and using a firearm to commit the crimes in the July 9 shooting on Moanalua Freeway near Tripler Army Medical Hospital.

The verdicts free Gonda to begin serving a one-year federal jail term for selling methamphetamine to an undercover police officer in 2007 within 1,000 feet of Kalihi Uka Elementary School.

He was on federal pretrial release in the drug case at the time of the freeway shooting. He has been in state custody for the shooting since September 2008.

Gonda does not deny being in the car from which shots were fired at two people in another vehicle, but he said one of the other four occupants in the car did the shooting.

The two people in the other vehicle were not able to identify who shot at them.

Gonda's lawyer, David Bettencourt, said the people in the car conspired to frame his client for the shooting because he had informed authorities on other gang members in another crime.

“;He's still concerned about his safety,”; Bettencourt said.

Deputy Prosecutor Scott Bell said Gonda was the only suspect.

“;No one said anyone else but Gonda shot the gun,”; Bell said.

Police said the shooting was gang-related and that members of the same gang are responsible for a string of violent crimes that summer including the Moanalua Freeway shooting, another shooting on the H-1 freeway June 29 and a home-invasion robbery in Aliamanu Aug. 11 that left a man paralyzed from the waist down from a gunshot wound.

Gonda was an informant who told police where to find several of the suspects in the home-invasion robbery.