Good Guy with a Gun #289: Henry Clay Township, PA

"Thank God the homeowner was armed," the district attorney said. | Original incident: August 17, 2024

Aug 16, 2026

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.

A couple was home at a little after eleven on a Saturday night — and there was a man inside the house with them. He was moving about from room to room, and then he walked back outside on his own.

The homeowner got a pistol.

He met the man in the driveway and told him to leave. The man wouldn’t. He threatened him instead, and turned back toward the house.

So the homeowner fired, several shots, and two of them hit the man in the face.

Troopers had already been called out for a burglary in progress, and it was over by the time they got there. They secured the homeowner’s firearm (standard procedure), worked on the man until the ambulance arrived, and had him flown to a hospital in Morgantown. He was listed in stable condition, and he lived.

By Monday, the DA had cleared the homeowner. “If there was ever a clean shooting, it’s this one,” Mike Aubele told the Herald-Standard. He’d said much the same on camera the night before: “Thank God the homeowner was armed. This could have been a lot worse.” The written release from his office kept the same position in a stiffer collar:

In this situation, we determined that the homeowner’s actions were appropriate. We have officially cleared the homeowner of any wrongdoing; no charges will be filed against him.

Pennsylvania’s Castle Doctrine allows deadly force as a first response inside your own home, and Aubele leaned on it. He’d spoken with the homeowner, too, who by his account was shaken up and had cooperated from the start. “Everybody deserves to feel safe in their home,” Aubele said, “and take appropriate action to protect their house, protect their castle.”

The man was David Luczak, 62, of Cleveland — roughly 150 miles from home, at a house in the far southern end of the county, below Ohiopyle and not far off the Maryland line. He hadn’t taken anything. The road, for whatever it’s worth, is called Mae West Road.

Aubele said his office had weighed the remoteness of the house and Luczak’s criminal history, “which includes involvement in a homicide in Cleveland in 2013.” A KDKA reporter asked him how that one had come out. He said he wasn’t sure whether Luczak was ever convicted.

Cleveland 19 News knew. Eleven years earlier, Luczak had pleaded guilty to charges out of a fatal shooting in a Cleveland parking lot — and what he ended up pleading to was improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle. He served fifteen months.

Great: A man dead in a parking lot on one end, and a gun-in-the-car charge on the other. Makes sense to me. Sure.

Nobody knew why Luczak was in the house, and Aubele said they were looking at the possibility of a mental health situation. They’d been in touch with Luczak’s family, and they’d gotten “some conflicting information from him.”

He was charged with burglary and criminal trespass, plus a count of loitering, and was to be arraigned whenever the hospital let him go.