Good Guy with a Gun #244: Rio Verde, AZ

A man died. A couple cooperated with police. The desert swallowed the rest. | Original incident: July 1, 2024

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is essentially the same as the calendar version.

The information here is as sparse as the vegetation.

Location: 160th Street and Dixileta Drive
Rio Verde, Maricopa County, Arizona.
Date: July 1, 2024
Time: 10:00 PM
Aggressor: 45-year-old Kyle Kepler
Victims: 31-year-old Thomas Griffin and his wife

Did they know each other? Don’t know.

Kepler “confronted” the Griffins. How? Don’t know.

UPDATE: Claude Werner, the Tactical Professor, points out that Kepler’s two sons were with him. This isn’t in any of the news reports I saw, but there’s a GoFundMe for Kepler’s family, and it supplies this detail.

Kepler pointed a firearm at them.

Griffin pulled his own gun and shot Kepler.

Kepler died.

Life-changing for the Griffins, life-ending for Kepler. This was a terrifying few moments, with all the adrenaline and drama of a horror movie.

But these sparse facts are almost all we’ve got. (We do also know that the Griffins waited for police and cooperated with them. Not much emotional pull in that, though.)

The Good Guy with a Gun: Not a myth, just under-documented.

Sources

AZ Central published the story, but it’s behind a paywall, so you can instead see the identical content syndicated on Yahoo!.

AZFamily did as well. There are a few syndicated versions of the story out there that I won’t list.

Finally, Fox 10 did as well.

All of these stories are essentially the same.

2A / Specialist media

John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) included this story in one of its roundups.