Good Guy with a Gun #106: Memphis, TN (free post)
Original incident: February 14, 2024. The TVs and Nikes aren't worth your life or a murder charge.
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Happy Saint Valentine’s Day!
A man woke in Memphis woke up at 3 AM to the sound of breaking glass in one of his apartment’s bedrooms. Suddenly, two men were in his bedroom. One of them started walking toward him, so he shot him.
He ran outside to call for help, and when he returned he saw the two men again at the window. He thought they were going to harm him, he says, and he shot at them again.
The two men were 29-year-old Fernando Diviney and his partner in crime, Tadarrius Allen. They had been breaking into apartments in the area and “stealing whatever was inside” — often looking for TVs and Nikes.
It seems that Diviney had been trying to pull Allen back out of the broken window when the tenant returned and fired at them again.
Allen was in a bad way, and while still at the scene, he got his final reward.
Diviney got a first degree murder charge, an aggravated burglary charge, a bullet wound, and a dead partner.
The tenant wasn’t charged. So why was Diviney charged with murder? As the DA said in a statement: “In the state of Tennessee a person can be charged with murder if someone was killed during the perpetration or attempted perpetration of a felony, as determined by Tennessee’s felony murder rule—burglary, robbery, or arson.”
One of the people interviewed by WREG for a reaction said, “What led that person to that in the first place? Where they feel like that had to be the option to survive?” I have to argue with him: They were going for TVs and Nike's, not survival.
The price of TVs and Nikes go way up when you try to get them by robbing an armed citizen and making him fear for his life.
Sources
This is a pretty straightforward story, so the coverage is all roughly the same.
WREG 3 spent some time getting the facts right along with some input from people in the area.
Fox 13 did a good job and gave it airtime.
WMC 5 did an initial report and a follow-up when it was determined that the shooter wouldn’t be charged.
ABC 24 also gave this good coverage.