Good Guy with a Gun #168: Beaver Falls, PA
When someone breaks into your home, you don't know who's entering or why. Here's why you don't get to ask. | Original incident: April 17, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
At around 5 AM in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a woman woke to noises coming from her basement. She didn’t yet know that a man had broken into her home through a tiny basement window.
She grabbed her 9mm pistol and crept downstairs. Suddenly, coming face-to-face with the intruder, she fired three shots.
The intruder, 49-year-old Brent Farmer, died.
Let’s talk about Brent Farmer1 for a minute. We’ll focus on just one day of his life: April 29, 2011. In fact, we’ll focus on just six hours of it. He was 36 at the time.
At 6:30 in the morning, he went to the home of an ex-girlfriend’s2 relative and smashed a pane of glass in the front door. He was charged with disorderly conduct and criminal mischief.
Three hours later, at 9:30 AM, he was outside his home with a woman. He grabbed her by the arms and started dragging her inside, using enough force to leave abrasions and bruises on both of her arms.
A passing postal worker called it in. Police came and took him to the station.
Where Farmer said he’d find and kill the postal worker who called the cops. So on top of simple assault, disorderly conduct, and harassment, he was also charged with making terroristic threats.
Later that morning — we haven’t hit noon yet — he went in front of Judge Joseph Schafer to be arraigned. Then he was taken to the regional booking center, and along the way he said he was going to “find out who the judge’s children were” and “see what the judge thinks when his family is involved.” Then, during a phone call to his mother while going through the booking process, he told mom to “get everything she can on Joe Schafer.”
And that’s how he got his third set of charges, once again for terroristic threats, in a six-hour time span.
I wish I had the resources to learn what happened based on those charges, but I don’t know.
What I do know is this: That’s the man who shattered the glass on a tiny basement window in a woman’s home and crept his way inside.
Video from multiple sources discuss this incident with Beaver County District Attorney Nate Bible. He said all the right things.
WPXI 11 shows him saying, “Thankfully, she had a firearm in the house. We don’t know what was going through the intruder’s mind, whether he was there potentially just to rob her, or harm her in other ways.”
KDKA’s Jennifer Borrasso asked him, “Did she do the right thing?”
“I think so,” he replied. “From a legal standpoint, yes, she did nothing wrong.” He further explained, “If someone enters your house, they are making that conscious decision.... You have that right to protect yourself and use deadly force.”
One final tidbit from the end of Borrasso’s report — she asked Bible what they should do if they don’t have a gun. Bible’s response was pretty amusing, as much for the look on his face as anything else.
“Well, there are classes to learn, you know, self-defense, you know, get a big dog to help you, and I guess, outside of having a firearm, I mean, anything can be used as a weapon.”
What I heard? Don’t be caught without a firearm. And I have to say that that’s a refreshing response from a government official.
Sources
Your top sources for this story are:
CBS News Pittsburgh’s piece by Jennifer Barasso, both in video and in text.
WPXI-TV’s work from Lonni Rivera and Alyssa Raymond, also in video and text.
WTAE 4’s segment from Ava Rash. The video is better than the text portion, and it includes a lot more video of the police in action.
All three of these outlets got good detail about the incident, along with community reaction (all from the same guy), and the first two got interviews with DA Bible.
The Times and Beaver County Radio (WBVP 99.3 FM and WMBA 95.7 FM) have brief coverage.
The Times is also the source of the details of six insane hours in Brent Farmer’s life.
Specialist media
The Truth About Guns and AWR Hawkins at Breitbart both covered this story.
Social media
No new information here, but there are over 500 comments on this Facebook post relating to this incident, almost all of them positive. If you want to get a sense of how the community thought about it, that is.
The Brent Farmer (no middle name noted in the sources) from the main incident described here was from Beaver Falls and was 49 when he died on April 17, 2024.
There’s an obituary of a Brent Alan Farmer from Beaver Falls who died on April 17, 2024. His birth date was March 31, 1975, which is consistent with him being 49 when he died.
The Brent A. Farmer named in the 2011 incident was also from Beaver Falls; the article states that he was 36 at the time of the incident, which is consistent with him being born on March 31, 1975. He was from Monaca, PA, which is six miles south of Beaver Falls.
Can I compare Social Security numbers? No. But it appears clear that this is the same guy.
Maybe current — the policeman on the scene wasn’t sure. But does it matter?