Good Guy with a Gun #195: Vermillion, SD
Two protection orders and two suspended sentences couldn't keep Chase Kinchen away. A guest with a gun did. | Original incident: May 14, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
Chase Kinchen had a paper trail related to a woman who was his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his very young child. For convenience, I’ll call her E.R.
November 2023: E.R. took out a protection order against him, claiming that Kinchen grabbed her face, pulled her hair, and said “I swear to God I’m going to strangle you”. She also claimed that he sent her threatening texts.
Four days later, Kinchen violated that protection order and received a 30-day sentence — suspended.
February 2024: Kinchen pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and disorderly conduct for the original case and received a 10-day sentence — suspended.
May 8, 2024: E.R. took out another protection order, claiming that Kinchen was angry that she had hired someone to lay flooring in her house. (Kinchen owned a lawn service business, but not a flooring business.) She claimed he started “throwing elbows” at her and got into running car with a child inside — not his child, but a son that she had with someone else — “and started to take off.”
So it is that by May 14, he was prohibited from getting within 500 feet of E.R.’s home or contacting her.
Then Kinchen texted a friend that he was going to “slaughter” E.R. He had a beard; he shaved it. He got a black face mask and dressed himself in black. He got hammered — his BAC was 0.23. And he got a gun and walked to her house.
He forced his way inside. E.R. and a guest were there.
Kinchen threatened the two with his gun, and then fired it at the guest, who fled to the garage. Kinchen pursued, but the guest1 grabbed a pistol from a vehicle and shot him in the arm and the chest.
Kinchen was pronounced dead at the scene.
Casting a critical eye
I’m pretty careful in my research for these stories and there’s a lot of evidence that Kinchen looked like an ordinary guy. He played hockey. He played a lot of poker, with lifetime winnings in the low five figures. He loved dogs. He loved his daughter. He had some low-level run-ins with police, but they’re things like traffic violations and one case of being a public nuisance.
And it’s really easy to find commentary from Kinchen’s sister claiming that he was “murdered” and that E.R. set him up, including hacking into his social media accounts.
I take that stuff seriously, even though many families of many criminals have a hard time believing that their loved ones committed heinous acts. There have been examples of fraud like that before.
But the trail isn’t hard to follow here. There was the incident itself on May 14, 2024. There was police commentary shortly afterward, saying it looked like self-defense. And there was a damning report by the State’s Attorney’s Office in November 2024 that detailed the lengths Kinchen went through that fatal night.
So let’s follow the trail, avoiding those parts with “he said, she said” potential.
An order of protection following an incident to which he pled guilty.
An immediate violation of the order of protection.
The “slaughter” text on the night he was killed.
Shaved beard, black mask, black clothes, gun — and that 0.23 BAC.
We — or I, at least, you do you — have to conclude that Kinchen brought this on himself. Orders of protection couldn’t stop him, but a guy with a gun did.
Sources
There’s a surprising amount of material on this case. Much of it is about the same; however, Perry Groten from KELO (a.k.a. “Keloland”) did some really important work pulling together the background from court papers. I thought his segment was well worth watching, but there’s also a text version: Man shot & killed in Vermillion had history of violence.
The rest are easy to place into two categories.
Initial reports. Most of these were from the time of the shooting — the news coming out was already calling it self-defense — to one outlier at the end of May. Coverage included Dakota News Now, KSCJ 1360 AM / 94.9 FM, SDPB (Public Radio), KCAU 9, KTIV 4, Sioux Falls Live (May 31), KELO, KORN AM 1490 / 101.3 FM, Vermillion Plain Talk
Final disposition. This came out after the State’s Attorney’s November announcement that there would be no charges against the shooter. KTIV 4, KYNT AM 1450 / FM 102.1, Watertown Radio, Vermillion Plain Talk, KELO (Radio this time) 1320 AM / 107.9 FM, and the grandiosely named Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan.
Most of the coverage says that the guest shot Kinchen; however, a few sources vary.
KITV initially said, “The other person [i.e., not the guest] picked up a handgun from a vehicle in the garage and shot Kinchen.” Later, reporting on the State’s Attorney’s decision, they say it was the guest.
Sioux Falls Live says, “The home’s resident was able to obtain a different handgun from a vehicle in the garage and returned fire.”
KELO says, “The guest retreated to an attached garage and was chased by Kinchen who fired his weapon at the person. The other person obtained a handgun from a vehicle in the garage and returned fire at Kinchen.”