Is the gun toting homeowner justified? There have been notable acquittals in such court trials. I’ve knocked on the wrong door on at least one occasion late at night.
http://www.westernmassnews.com/story/32461115/teenager-in-serious-condition-after-chicopee-shooting
Since the victim was drunk my guess is that the “knocking on the door” was really pounding on the door. The victim broke the pane of glass before he was shot.
What do the asterisks in the header stand for?
Justice involved person?
“When a pane of glass broke” … Panes of glass just don’t break. Clearly the young man was doing more than simple knocking on the door. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what you get when you use guns for personal protection.
Do not knock on any doors late at night. Call from cell that you are there and ask them to open the door.
So it happened that somebody knocked at my door after 10pm. I simply did not open…they did not break any glass, but if they did, I would call 911 immediately and would wish with all my heart that I had a gun and knew how to use it. I cannot even imagine, why anybody would not protect themselves in their own house. So, we just have to wait until we a robed and killed before we can protect ourselves? Well, I do not watch “Walking Dead” and I do not believe that the dead person can protect his family and I also believe in my right to stay alive. I would not go around and break the glass in others’ houses either…
Breaking the glass was wrong. But shooting him the chest was too. I would think this will be pleaded down to a lesser charge.
It happened at 1pm. Daylight. Not the middle of the night. There was according to this article an attempt at communication (one wonders what that was). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/18/a-teenager-knocked-on-the-wrong-door-now-hes-dead-and-the-homeowner-is-accused-of-murder/?hpid=hp_hp-morning-mix_mm-story-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
I’ll wait for more information but my initial feeling is that the homeowner overreacted. Maybe he’d been the victim of home invasions or burglaries or something else so that he expected a crime to be commited but unless something like that comes out, it seems to me he overreacted.
The teenagers were drunk. Like the women and men in so many campus sexual consent cases, they were drunk. Young people drinking is a scourge. More needs to be done to make drinking so ‘uncool’ that kids will stop. It worked for cigarettes and decreasing smoking. More needs to be done to convince teens that losing your powers of rationality and reasoning by drinking alcohol or taking drugs is just STUPID and anyone who does it is just STUPID.
If the homeowner had dialed 911 before going down with his firearm, it probably wouldn’t have happened. They probably would have talked him through it. He would still have been able to defend himself if he really needed to before the police got there.
I don’t blame him for being potentially frightened and disoriented when awakened by drunken pounding, but I’d bet that if he didn’t have a weapon he would have called the police FIRST. I wonder if he’s happy that he got that gun to “defend himself” now.
Sad all round.
ETA: Sorry, I stand corrected. I just assumed it was the middle of the night. In that case, he should have been able to see that it was two kids and he has little to stand on. Manslaughter.
There is no Stand Your Ground law in MA and the Castle Law is clear person must be inside the dwelling. According to what I just read there is “a duty to retreat” before self defense can be used.
http://www.gunlaws101.com/state/law/massachusetts/stand-your-ground
It will now be up to jury to decide, but it doesn’t sound like the homeowner retreated and/or called 911 so he may be found guilty by a jury of his peers.
Yes, funny how that was phrased. I’ve noticed that some posters, when referring to people who have rioted, looted, and destroyed property in the name of the cause that the poster supports, they will call them “knuckleheads.” Yesterday on my nursing forum, a poster stated that she was denied a Texas license because years ago she “received an assault charge.” How people word things can be very interesting.
This sounds like a sad story all around. I also wish the homeowner had called 911 first. I personally would probably have retreated with my weapon and telephone, hoping to avoid just such a thing. But it’s hard to know how one would actually react in any situation like that.
There was a similar case here in Michigan not too long ago. Homeowner was convicted of murder. She didn’t break the glass though.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/
I don’t think it’s justified. You shoot when your life is in immediate danger. Nothing about this story sounds like he was.
There was a similar case here in NoVA a few years ago and the teen was shot to death.
This is why I am not a big fan of guns for protection. We have had a monitored alarm system for years.
We had a situation last fall where the alarm went off and the security company called us. Thankfully one of us was not pointing a gun as it was a family member who was staying overnight who had set off the alarm.
I would call it manslaughter, not murder, but he does sound guilty. He may have been frightened, but it does not appear that a reasonable person would have feared for their life in this situation. And as a gun owner, the onus was on him to understand the laws in his state and what he was allowed to do to protect himself. He clearly failed to do so.
The article is very badly written, as is not uncommon in write-ups by TV stations. No competent newspaper editor would have let it go out.
Reminds of of this sad case in 1992 in Baton Rouge.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/24/us/acquittal-in-doorstep-killing-of-japanese-student.html?pagewanted=all
We had a drunk guy try and get into our house when we lived intown in Atlanta. It was late at night and I had two toddlers in the house and my husband was away on a work trip. I called 911 and the dog (big standard poodle) was going ape**** at the front door as the guy kept pounding on the door.
The cops got there before he got in, and he said he thought it was a Kroger (local supermarket) as they hauled him away (it wasn’t until then that I realized he was drunk and not a maniac trying to kill us). I was absolutely terrified.
If he had gotten through the front door I would have shot him. We were both lucky.
We moved soon after that…
Agree.
Windows usually do not break themselves. The article leaves it unclear whether it was broken by the drunk pounding on it or by the resident shooting through it, or if investigation has not determined why the window was broken.
@cbreeze, I thought of the same case.
This highlights one of the problems with 'home defense" that is often cited for example in the need to have a gun in the house. Even cops, who are relatively well trained, can panic, and when you are dealing with someone who likely had little or no training on using the gun, or on how to properly defend themselves with it, things like this will happen. In this case, the pane of glass may be relevant IMO, if the person broke the glass that is next to the door lock where they could conceivable open the door, to me if I was on a jury I would think it could be justified. On the other hand, if the pane of glass that was broken could not be used in opening the door, then I would assume the shooter simply panicked (and if the glass was blown out being shot through by the homeowner, I would vote to convict them of manslaughter).
These kind of tragedies happen, and it isn’t that uncommon. Put it this way, cops and law enforcement agents go through training on appropriate use of deadly force, and even they screw up (read about the Amadou Diallo incident in NYC, for example, where inexperienced cops panicked). It isn’t just about feeling threatened, the fact that the person felt threatened doesn’t matter, what matters is if on review the person had a rational reason to feel threatened.
For example, if someone walks on my property, and I shoot and kill that person from inside my house, in most places you would be convicted of manslaughter or other consequences for misapplying use of deadly force. On the other hand, if I am inside my house, someone comes on my property, and I warn them I am armed and that they better leave, and they continue to come towards my house and myself, ignoring the warnings, it would be a lot more likely it would be found to be justified use of force.
The problem with merely “feeling afraid” as justification is that more than a few people have anxiety disorders and other tendencies where they freak out that to someone outside would appear ridiculous, it is why the reasonable man standard is applied in these cases (I was an alternate on a jury on a case that used reasonable man arguments, and they explained the concept in detail, about how to apply it).
I agree that the article cited is really vague, I would need a lot more detail in this case to determine whether the use of force was justified or not, and obviously what the local law was, too. In Texas you would get away with a lot more things, from what I have read, than you would in NJ when it came to a case like this, in NJ I suspect this guy based on what i know of its laws (as a non lawyer) would be charged.