These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
This is a long one.
A little before eight on a Saturday morning, Donald Barron pulled into the parking lot at Prairie Heights Community Church where he saw a fellow parishioner on the ground, hurt, and a stranger in a white bathrobe nearby.
Barron, 53, got out of his car with his handgun already in hand. “What the f**k are you doing?” he yelled, ordering the man to the ground. For almost two minutes, by the account Cass County prosecutors later pieced together from three separate videos, Barron kept ordering him down while the man refused to comply.
Then the man lost the robe and started walking toward Barron — hands up, empty — saying, “I fear no one.” Twice.
Barron backed up. He kept backing up — a genuinely dangerous thing to do with an unpredictable man closing the distance, not the move of somebody looking for a reason to shoot.
I encourage you to watch the video. It’s always an option, but here it’s the whole story, in my opinion. The news reports all say the man was “walking” toward Barron, but it was a fast pace.
“Stop. Stay back,” he said. Then: “Stay back. I’m going to shoot. I’m going to shoot.” The man closed the gap to a couple of feet anyway. Barron fired once, into his chest.
He unloaded the gun, set it on the hood of his car, and called 911 himself.
The man was 25-year-old Austin Strom, and he died of that single shot. Neither Barron nor the man he was beating, Kent Hodges, a 66-year-old man with dementia, knew him — they had never met, even though Strom’s mother said Strom also belonged to their congregation.
Strom had been sleeping in the church parking lot. He’d moved back to his hometown of Browerville, Minnesota, a couple of weeks earlier but kept driving the two-plus hours back to Fargo-Moorhead for Prairie Heights, where he’d been attending for about six months and served as a volunteer greeter. The night before, he texted his mother that he was “home.” Asked if he was okay, he wrote back: “Mom, I am the most serene I have ever been. I am laying at the church reading scripture.” It was the last message she got from him.
Something had gone badly wrong by morning. Hodges had showed up on that Saturday morning, fooled by his dementia into believing it was Sunday. Strom was already there, outside, in the white robe, talking about God and forgiveness.
Hodges recorded Strom for about six minutes. Finally, triggered by we-don’t-know-what, Strom he picked up a large rock and told Hodges, “I’m telling you. It’s my house, and we gotta go. I’m the king.”
The screen capture is a little blurry, but that entire item outlined in yellow is the rock. Strom moved to smash the church’s glass door.
Hodges tried to stop him; the two struggled, and Hodges fell to the ground. Strom kicked him in the head and face, opening a cut on his chin, until he lost a tooth, had several more knocked loose, and needed stitches.
Strom’s toxicology came back positive for THC; investigators found 25 vape cartridges of it in his car. His mother says he’d struggled with addiction, trauma, and mental health since he was young, and had recently beaten a years-long gambling addiction.
Two months later, Assistant Cass County State’s Attorney Ryan Younggren declined to charge Barron. North Dakota law didn’t require him to retreat, but he’d done it anyway — a pretty long distance, and pretty dangerously, to my mind — before he ever fired. Here’s Younggren’s memo:
The legal question for the State’s Attorney’s Office...is not whether Strom’s death could have been avoided but can self-defense and defense of others be disproven beyond a reasonable doubt... the State is unable to disprove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Barron was not acting in lawful defense of self and others.
Barron, a driver’s-ed teacher at West Fargo High School, kept his job and never spoke to a reporter.
Not everyone was satisfied.
Longtime West Fargo resident Greg Akason called it vigilante behavior. “If you want to be a hero, just fire your weapon into the sky, man. Shoot it in the air, you didn’t have to kill him,” he said. “Why didn’t he just call 911 before he got out of his vehicle?”
(My response: “Stop saying stupid things” and “Watch the video,” respectively.)
Robin Strom, Austin’s mother, said her son wasn’t the threat the prosecutor described: “There was simply no threat at that point in time, and the fight was over by the time [Barron] arrived. He chose to interject himself.”
(My response: Watch the video.)
She called the decision dangerous: “It’s OK to just be able to walk up and shoot somebody unarmed.”
(My response: “Unarmed” doesn’t mean “not dangerous,” and you apparently don’t understand the law or incentives.)
InForum columnist Mike McFeely wrote a whole piece backing her up, calling the shooting “gross” and “cold-blooded” and closing with, “Austin Strom’s mother is right to question the decision. We all should.”
(My response: We have very different opinions about what’s on that video, and I have to think you’d think differently if you were the one on whom Strom was advancing.)
Fargo resident Ashley Hesse, on the other side of it, kept things simple: “At the end of the day, it’s self-defense.”
(My response: At last. Duh. Thank you.)
A man died, and I don’t want to be a jerk about it. But we’re talking about a man who was having a drug-induced psychotic break, smashing doors, hurting an old man, advancing quickly on a man who had a gun trained on him. He had already shown himself to be a threat. In a perfect world, that threat could have been stopped without harm to him — ideally, before he ever became a threat.
But that’s not reality, and given a choice between fantasy and reality, I prefer to live in reality. The most frustrating part of writing and researching this story was seeing the second-guessing and outright hostility to a man who did what a man sometimes has to do.
Two weeks out, Hodges was still declining interviews, citing an aphasia diagnosis. Strom’s family, in a statement, said only, “The truth will come out.” By that time, it already had.
Sources
Valley News Live and InForum did the most sustained coverage, each running the story from the first morning through the no-charges decision.
Valley News Live ran six pieces:
Police investigate shooting in parking lot of West Fargo church (day-of)
New details released in deadly shooting outside West Fargo church
WFPS confirms church parking lot shooter is a teacher within the district
Community divided after no charges filed in shooting at West Fargo church
West Fargo Police release footage of deadly August shooting outside church
InForum ran four, including columnist Mike McFeely’s piece questioning the decision and two interviews with Strom’s mother:
Mother of man killed outside West Fargo church says he slept there, called it home
Mother of man fatally shot outside West Fargo church says son’s death is hard to ‘comprehend’
Video shows what led to deadly shooting outside West Fargo church
McFeely: We should all question decision to not charge man who shot Austin Strom
KFGO covered both ends of the story:
Man shot in West Fargo church parking lot identified; Family shares fundraiser
Police release names in deadly West Fargo shooting, no charges filed
Prairie Public ran two:
No charges will be sought in ‘self-defense’ killing at West Fargo church (Bring Me The News)
Aunt of Prairie Heights Church Shooting Victim Speaks Out (KVRR)
More than 2 weeks after fatal West Fargo church shooting, few new details emerge (Grand Forks Herald)
News Dakota’s account is the odd one out — it says Strom died at the scene, where other outlets say he died at a Fargo hospital. No Charges Filed in Fatal Shooting Outside West Fargo Church (News Dakota)
West Fargo Teacher will not face charges self-defense shooting and death (AM 1100 The Flag/WDAY Radio; carries the fullest excerpt of the prosecutor’s memo, including verbatim dialogue from the video)
It's so easy to be armchair quarterbacks. I'm glad there are still people willing to intervene when someone else is being harmed.