From the Norfolk, VA Virginian-Pilot Newspaper: One man's deadly choice By LINDA MCNATT, The Virginian-Pilot © September 29, 2005 Last updated: 1:57 AM It was late when they got home, so late that the cluster of town houses at the top of the hill was dark. Earlier this month, Fred Taylor, a Suffolk native and first-year law student at Mercer University, was returning from a fancy birthday dinner with his girlfriend to his home in Macon, Ga. When the couple went inside, Taylor switched on the lights in the living room, the dining room and kitchen. Ceiling fans whirred. Taylor’s girlfriend, Adrienne Warren, 22, went upstairs, changed clothes and settled downstairs on the couch in front of the TV. Taylor, also 22, was watching “Law & Order,” sitting in a chair across the room. Warren, a senior at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, remembers that she dozed off for a while. The TV show was ending when she woke up around midnight. That’s when Taylor heard something outside the dining room window, footsteps on the wooden deck. “Get upstairs,” he told Warren. “Somebody’s outside.” She ignored him. Instead, she walked across the room and peered out of the peep hole on the front door. The motion-detection floodlight at the front of the house erupted, but Warren said she couldn’t see anybody. She felt her boyfriend lay his hand on her shoulder. He told her to get away from the door and go upstairs. By then, he had cut out all of the lights in the house, turned off the television and gone upstairs to retrieve his gun. Taylor, who graduated from Nansemond River High School and Old Dominion University, had gotten the gun, a .357 Magnum, after applying for a concealed weapons permit a year ago. He traveled a lot late at night for a civic organization, he said, and believes in the right to bear arms. Taylor quickly pushed his girlfriend up the stairs and into the bedroom . He told her to lock the door. By that time, both of them could hear the screen being cut on the dining room window. Taylor was still at the top of the stairs and Warren was on the phone to the police when they heard glass break, echoing through the three-level house with hardwood floors. The alarm system blared like a siren, Taylor said. Upstairs, a trembling Warren didn’t know what was happening below. Holding the handgun in both hands, Taylor started back down the stairs. At the second landing, he stopped, sat down and waited. Edward Wayne Anderson, 42, had gotten out of jail the day before after serving time for pimping prostitutes, according to Macon police. On the night of Sept. 17, Anderson walked past the other dark houses on Taylor’s street. He walked up onto the deck around the second floor of Taylor’s town house, popped the top off a Smirnoff Ice, left the top near one of the doors and eventually threw the bottle in the backyard, police said. Before the glass broke, the couple heard Anderson painstakingly try each of three downstairs doors, rattling the knobs. He disarmed the house’s automatic sprinkler system. Taylor said he might have thought it was the alarm. Sitting on the landing, five steps above the dining room, Taylor saw Anderson’s hand, wrapped in a rag, reach through the broken window glass. He heard him ease the window up. The darkness inside the house was dotted with several night lights Taylor liked to leave on. Anderson , who according to police had a string of convictions in the Macon area, stepped through the window and looked up the stairs, where his eyes met Taylor’s. Taylor remembers thinking that there would be no negotiations. Taylor fired his gun once, striking Anderson in the upper torso. Anderson fell over, and Taylor ran back upstairs. It took several seconds to persuade Warren to open the door. When he got inside the bedroom, he turned and locked the door again. The police were outside by then. By the time police led Warren downstairs, a sheet had been hung to hide Anderson’s lifeless body. Taylor’s family from Virginia arrived a week ago, after Warren had left from the Atlanta airport to go home. The blood has been cleaned up by a service the police recommended. The screen and window have been repaired, the sprinkler system reconnected and the alarm system checked. Just a few days after the incident that made front-page headlines in Macon, police returned the .357 Magnum to Taylor. He will not be charged in the incident, said Howard Simms , district attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit. Georgia law is similar to Virginia’s, he said. If somebody makes a forcible entry into your home, you are entitled to defend yourself. “There is no doubt about what happened,” Simms said. “You can hear the window glass breaking on the 911 tape.” When Warren returned to school on Tuesday, her Shakespeare class was studying Richard III, a monstrous villain who, in Shakespeare’s play, killed everybody who got in his way. She said her professor turned to her and asked if she thought Richard got what he deserved. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” she remembers saying. And she cried, ending up in a counselor’s office for several hours. For her, she said, the experience will never be over. Looking back, Taylor said he believes that Anderson thought Warren was in the house alone. He thinks Anderson may have peeped through the crack at the side of the blinds on the window and seen Warren on the couch. “I regret being put in the position I was put in,” Taylor said. “I regret having to take a human life.” But under the same circumstances, he said, he’d do it again. [/url]
The mo-fo intruder thought the woman was in the house alone. I wonder what was on his mind? :roll: Scratch one more POS off of the planet! :wink:
This is exactly why my wife and teenaged sons know how to load, handle and fire all of my pistols. This whack job wasn't even deterred by the alarm going off...he just kept coming. Some might fault the homeowner for not "warning" the intruder -- but I would think the locked door and alarm are warning enough. I think the only thing I would have done differently was not to stop after just one shot. I have a magazine that holds 17 -- and ammo is cheap! Jim
Yeah, Navy - that's about what I was thinking. Knew the house was occupied, not deterred by the alarm...I would have thought "classic 10-percenter" (those 10% that don't stop coming until they're disabled).
October 1st people... meet force with force.. new law.. no more having to turn and walk away or run. only thing i would have done differently is negotiated a headshot. followed by a low to the right center mass trailer.
In that situation I have to say shoot first and talk later is a good policy. Thats the only thing some people are going to understand. Matches
A Clear & Present Danger The way I see it there was a clear and present danger presented by the intruder and the action taken to remedy the situation was no more than was required. The fact that people were at home watching television with lights on to begin with implies that the intruder must have known that the home was occupied. Common sense would dictate that at night many people are at home and that is why a great deal of burglaries take place during the middle of the day (believe it or not). Futhermore, the evidence of the alcoholic beverage in the backyard would indicate that the man was intoxicated and not someone thinking clearly as evidenced by the fact that he through the bottle in the backyard. Surely a person who has faced prior arrests would have at least a rudementary knowledge about finger prints and evidence collection. However, even assuming he was a novice burglar only attempting to steal property he did continue into the home after setting off an alarm. Logic would dictate that someone simply trying to take home appliances or jewlery would have fled and simply selected another home on another night. Finally, the man having been previously convicted of being a pimp added to the fact that the residence was that of a single young female seems to at least suggest that criminal sexual conduct was the intent of the intruder. From the facts given I would support the young mans decision to use lethal force as it was clearly reasonable for a person of average intelligence to assume their life and the lives of others were at risk given the totality of the circumstances. However, I do not support the idea of being in a seated position on a stair landing as I think it would have been wiser to stand and use some type of cover. In addition, the single shot may not had been enough to subdue the intruder and there could have been another individual within the home. The young man did not proceed to clear the rest of the home from the information given and simple retreated to his girlfriends bedroom. Luckily they are both alive and there is one less dangerous criminal on the street.
Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice-- that makes them less likely to be sympathetic figures in court, and leaves only the homeowner to give his side of the story. The young man is to be applauded for his coolness and bravery, but someone needs to tell him why they put all those chambers in the cylinder!
Yep one shot is good but when it comes to self defense two is better. Bullets are cheap; lawyers are not. having only one side to the story should greatly decrease your legal bills. Matches
Yeah, now all this guy's legal worries will be restricted to civil court. Odds are high that some "distraught relative" will show up to ask for compensation due to the loss of this pillar of society. I like the old Norse concept of "outlaw". Once you had been officially declared an outlaw, you were beyond the protection of the law. This wasn't taken lightly-- everybody got together and voted on it at an annual council. In a land where everybody was a Viking, it took a pretty serious list of nastiness to get you outlawed. At that point your best bet was to leave the country, because it meant your victims could do anything they wanted without being charged. It was open season. No legal recourse.
Saw this on a local news website this morning. No gun involved, but the end result is the same. A little chlorine in the gene pool can be a good thing. Man who tried to rob home killed in scuffle with homeowners
Since we are talking about the good guys winning, here is another story for you all. ----- Two injured in gunfight that interrupts robbery ADAM LYNN; The News Tribune Last updated: September 30th, 2005 08:37 AM (PDT) A Tacoma man who went to an auto parts store to help a friend fix her car Thursday found himself trading gunfire with a would-be robber, shooting the gunman several times, police said. A clerk at the store was hit in the crossfire. Both the 21-year-old man who witnesses said tried to rob the store and the clerk – a woman in her 30s – are expected to live. The man who pulled out his gun to stop the robbery – Joe Phillips – was not hurt. Phillips, the father of a 12-year-old daughter, was interviewed by detectives Thursday morning and released. There are no plans to arrest him, police spokesman Mark Fulghum said. “When someone points a gun at you, you have a right to defend yourself,” Fulghum said. “From what we hear, he told the guy to put down his gun. He gave him warnings.” The 21-year-old man most likely will be arrested when he’s released from the hospital, Fulghum said. The shooting occurred at about 9 a.m. at the Schucks store near East 72nd Street and East Portland Avenue in Tacoma. Witnesses told police a young man entered the store carrying a gas can and began to fuel a small motorcycle on display. When another clerk at the store told him to stop, the man pulled out a gun, pointed it at the worker and announced he was robbing the place, Fulghum said. It was then that Phillips, who is in his 40s, pulled out his own gun and told the younger man to drop his, Fulghum said. The two then exchanged gunfire. It was unclear Thursday who fired the first shot or which man shot the clerk, Fulghum said. Forensics experts were on the scene for most of the day collecting evidence. Fulghum said police do not encourage people to take such matters into their own hands but to call 911 during or immediately after witnessing a crime. Phillips’ brother, Karl, came to the store about an hour after the shooting to see about getting his brother’s truck. He said his brother went to the store to help a friend whose car was broken down. Joe Phillips is a gun enthusiast known to carry a pistol, Karl Phillips said. He said he wasn’t surprised that his brother decided to do something when he saw the robbery in progress. “That’s exactly like Joe,” Karl Phillps said. “Joe’s a good Samaritan, always has been. Joe wouldn’t have got involved if he didn’t think it was a matter of life and death.” Originally published: September 30th, 2005 12:01 AM (PDT)
Woooh! I certainly hope it turns out the would be robber was the one who shot the clerk. Seven shots and he didn't kill him? Wonder what caliber the pistol was? I can sure as heck tell it wasn't a Steyr or the robber would be in hell where he belongs instead of walking out of a hospital.
Pretty rare that an attorney will take a civil case that wasn't first put to a criminal court. It would mean alot more out-of-pocket expenses for the attorney if he was taking the case on a contigent fee basis because he wouldn't have all the ground work that would already be there if he was following a criminal trial. Now I'm not saying that it will not happen, but that it is less likely to happen. Since the criminal himself is still alive he would be the only one with real standing to file a complaint.
Stories like this warm the cockles of my heart, but I wish to respectfully disagree with a couple of the responding comments. Ripped- Yeah a headshot is preferable, but a couple in the chest first increase your chances of a 1st round hit and may slow him down enough to make the headshot is more feasible. Ministerof Death- Not attempting to clear the house by himself was sound reasoning and tactics. He had a defensible position with a full cyl minus 1 round to cover the only approach. Leaving it to clear the house would have exposed him to far more danger had the scumbag been accompanied by more subhumans. I have taken FAS-3 at the Firearms Academy of Seattle, and Marty Hayes makes it clear that defending a position is far preferable to trying to clear your house. Call the Cops and remain in the place you can defend with minimal avenues of approach until they arrive. A Cop won't attempt to clear a building without backup. It's just not a good idea.
The way I see it the guy did all right. Easy to say "should've" but hard to argue w/ bad guy dead and family safe (and no charges).
REVJEN 45 Good point. I can see both positive and negative aspects of maintaining a strong point for defense. However, from what I see in the article he did not maintain his position, but instead relocated to the interior of the bedroom his girlfriend was in. Now I can see relocation, but not if it means pounding on the door trying to convince your girlfriend to let you in while others may be advancing. Of course, given his limited amount of ammunition and the circumstances perhaps that was his only option (wasn't there).
