Good Guy with a Gun #25: Hendersonville, NC

Original incident: November 24, 2023. A felon got one shot off, and missed. His victim didn’t miss.

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The background

Elijah Edward Timmons III’s life had long been marked by violence.

• At 18, in 2013, he pleaded guilty to common law robbery, landing 232 days in jail.

• By 21, federal marshals had to hunt him down in South Carolina on charges of assault with a deadly weapon intending to kill, tied to drive-by shootings at Asheville’s Klondyke and Ledgewood apartments.

• In 2016, at age 24, he pointed a handgun at a man and tried to shoot him during an altercation.

• Two years later, there was another arrest for threats, reckless driving, and fleeing police.

• In July 2023, just four months before this incident, he was nabbed downtown Asheville on a stack of failure-to-appear warrants for a wide variety of driving violations and possession of marijuana.

Let’s be fair: He was apparently part of a violent culture, and had been victimized himself. Maybe he could have done better in a different environment.

The incident

Regardless, it all ended on Thanksgiving night, 2023. Around 2:30 AM on November 24, Timmons, 30, arrived at Hendersonville’s Orchard Bar & Grill with his girlfriend, his cousin, and her boyfriend. As closing time hit, a crowd spilled into the Henderson Crossing parking lot. There’s a reference in the reporting to an “altercation,” but it’s unclear whether it was purely verbal or if there was a physical element.

Surveillance video showed Timmons raise his hand toward someone, and then a flash. His target person shot back instantly, hitting Timmons in the head. He died at the scene.

Hendersonville police initially called it a murder, but they quickly determined that the fatal shot was fired in self-defense.

The big question

This scenario raises a question I constantly ask myself: How do we know that the Good Guy with a Gun is really a “good guy”? Maybe he was “just another gang-banger,” as someone might say. (I don’t like that term, but it conveys the attitude I’m talking about.) Maybe he wasn’t helping to avoid the conflict that was building; maybe he was even goading Timmons.

To resolve the issue, I ask myself another question: “Would the world be a better place if the shooter were disarmed?” With that in mind, let’s consider a few things:

• The shooter wasn’t charged for the fact that he had a gun, which is a strong indication that he wasn’t a convicted felon. Keeping and bearing handguns is pretty easy in North Carolina, so it’s not surprising that he wasn’t charged with violations there.

• We know from Timmons’s history that he had a tendency to violence. His victim (because the person being shot at was, in fact, the victim here) no doubt knew that as well.

• Timmons was a threat to the general public. He had already fired a shot in a crowded area, and we should be thankful that nobody was hit — intentionally or unintentionally.

• Timmons was also, obviously, a direct threat to the shooter’s life.

And given the four points above, I have to answer that the world would not be a better place if the shooter had been disarmed.

Even if the shooter were “just another gang-banger,” in that moment, he was acting as a Good Guy with a Gun: His response to an immanent threat of deadly force was proportionate and reasonable. It wasn’t safe to run away, and North Carolina is a Stand Your Ground state anyway, so he had no obligation to do so. The only possible question is whether or not he had egged Timmons on, and no matter what he may have said, gunfire was not proportional to his words.

The aftermath

Timmons’s mother is a whole second half of this story. On the night of the shooting, she arrived on-scene and was ultimately handcuffed by police and charged for various offenses. Those charges were eventually dropped because they weren’t deemed to be in the interest of justice; meanwhile, she filed a complaint against the Hendersonville PD. She questions the official narrative and has continued to protest against the police. She’s not the point, of course, but the stories that talk about her also sometimes talk about the details of the shooting, so I’m including them in the sources.

Sources

There was a tremendous amount of coverage of this event, though surprisingly I saw nothing in the usual pro-gun sources.

General

WLOS does a great job with these, it seems: incident, digging into 911 calls, no charges; charges dropped against mom, mom files complaint, mom continues protests.

Blue Ridge Now has three: incident, no charges; mom wants more investigation

The Citizen-Times has three: one about the incident, one about mom’s arrest, one about her continued protests.

Fox, Shore News Network, WHKP, and WSPA each have just one, and only covering the original incident. It’s like once the guy is dead, it’s just a crime scene: Move along.

The Hendersonville Lightning has two: incident, no charges.

WYFF 4 has two: incident, no charges.

Mom-only

There’s a Facebook video from the mom on the “Blue Chameleons Investigations” page. They’re a private investigations firm.

The NC Beat did an apparently uncritical write-up of the mom’s claims.

KTVZ wrote up the fact that charges against the mom were dropped.

Other

Finally, the National Gun Violence Memorial has a record of Timmons’s death, with links to some news articles. I disagree with their stance on “gun violence,” right down to thinking that the term shows their bias — we’d almost never talk about “car violence” or “Molotov cocktail violence” — but, to their credit, they do link to an article that shows that Timmons died from a shot fired in self-defense.

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