Good Guy with a Gun #233: Port Orange, FL
There are two versions of what happened in that driveway. One of them is on video. | Original incident: October 26, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
Sixteen-year-old Gage Ahrens and his twenty-one-year-old friend, Manny Westfall, were driving home in two cars on a Saturday evening in October. As they passed Marcus Blicker’s house, Blicker started following them.
The Ahrens and Blicker families had some bad blood between them. It apparently started with airsoft gunshots being exchanged — painful, but not fatal — and continued for some time after that. Just a few days prior, there had been a verbal altercation between Blicker, Gage Ahrens, and eighteen-year-old Gunner Ahrens. If the Ahrens boys are to be believed, Blicker made a number of threats that day.
So when Blicker started tailgating and swerving erratically behind them, the terrified teen called his father from the car.
When the boys pulled into the driveway, Blicker followed and shouted threats at them. The father confronted him, rifle in hand, even firing three warning shots. (Don’t do that.) “I knew one thing, my son was eight feet behind me and that guy was not getting to them,” the father said.
Blicker backed up like he was leaving, but then surged his truck forward toward the father and another person. You can see the video on Fox 35.
Blicker’s family insists that he was leaving, but I don’t see how anyone who watches the surveillance video can believe that.
The video shows the father firing several shots, stopping the truck and killing Blicker.
The father wishes there had been dialogue instead of violence, even losing sleep over it all: “Nobody wanted this,” he said.
Sources
Primary
The Volusia County Sheriff posted their report to their website and on Facebook — where there are over 700 comments.
News
This story got very wide coverage — pretty common when there’s video — so we can point to the New York Post and the Daily Mail alongside local news sources like Fox 35 (including an article from Blicker’s family’s perspective, the video above, and an archived post).
I won’t detail all of the places where it was covered, but if you’re interested in detail, I’d go with the Fox 35 articles and the Daytona Beach News-Journal. Their article is live but paywalled, so the link goes to the shared syndication link from Yahoo.
2A / specialist media
Colion Noir covered this story at his site, and Dave Urbanski covered it for Blaze Media.