Good Guy with a Gun #246: Portsmouth, VA
He tried to steal from the same store twice. There won't be a third time. | Original incident: July 4, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
According to a witness interviewed by WAVY 10, 27-year-old Rahsaan Nixon1 had entered the Essex Food Store on July 3 and tried to shoplift some merchandise. It’s not clear how successful he may have been.
The next day, he again entered the store to shoplift.
Employees confronted him, and things escalated until a store clerk shot him. He left the store and was taken to the hospital, where he died.
Police put out a request on Facebook for the identification of four people who were captured on surveillance video. They were clear that these four people weren’t the shooter.
But they never identified the shooter, arrested him, or charged him.
Unlike most situations, where we only have a strong indicator (silence in the news) that the police don’t intend to charge someone, in this case there are multiple Facebook posts — the most recent one from February of this year — expressing frustration with the police specifically because the shooter hadn’t been named or arrested.
The family disputes the whole thing, claiming that the shooting was unlawful and that the shooter should be charged.
I didn’t know Nixon, so I can’t speak directly to his character. The police chief confirmed that he was shoplifting. We know that there was surveillance footage from the store, because the police used stills from it to ask the public about witnesses. We know that this store has caged windows to prevent theft. And we know that the crime rate in Portsmouth is awful (this is from city-data.com):
It seems reasonably likely, then, that the police could see the surveillance footage of the shoplifting and the altercation that followed. It seems very likely that the store employees had a reasonable fear of violent criminal activity. And without charges, it seems that the police and DA felt that either it was clearly self-defense or that they wouldn’t be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooting wasn’t in self-defense.
Family objections aside, this looks like a solid DGU.
Sources
Primary
Here’s the Portsmouth PD’s Facebook post referred to above.
Here are two Facebook posts (1,2) that tell you the family’s side of the story.
News
WAVY 10 has the interview with the witness — the only such reference I could find.
The Virginian-Pilot (paywalled) is syndicated through Yahoo! (not paywalled).
WTKR 3 has two stories, reflecting the fact that more than one person was shot in this area at around the same time. 13 News Now has one, but also TV coverage of the violent holiday.
WAVY 10’s news coverage here is the same as that at the text link above.
2A / Specialist media
Octavius Mayhem reported on this story at The Truth About Guns.
John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) included it in one of their monthly roundups.
Most of the coverage just calls him “Nixon.” There’s a Facebook post that calls him “Rahsaan Hawthorne-Nixon,” and in a comment on that post his father, Elliott, calls him “Rahsaan Hawthorne Nixon.” Since his father didn’t use the hyphenated name, I’ll follow the lead of news organizations and call him “Nixon.”