Good Guy with a Gun #32: Los Angeles, CA

Original incident: December 2, 2023. In the Granada Hills neighborhood, the great equalizer helped a homeowner fight off three masked, hooded, and armed burglars.

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I confess that this story frustrates me.

Not because it happened in a very nice section of Los Angeles, though that’s true. Granada Hills is a desirable neighborhood, tucked up in the San Fernando Valley. You’ve probably seen some of its trees in the flying bicycle scene in E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Crime happens everywhere, and well-to-do people have every right to protect themselves, so I have no issue with the neighborhood itself.

No, I get frustrated because a home invasion GGWAG shooting in this nice neighborhood gets massive coverage — even international coverage, since there was a now-deleted article in the Daily Mail about it. There are so many places where violence and home invasions are more common, but because they’re more common, people don’t seem to care as much.

Nevertheless, there was a good guy with a gun in Los Angeles. Let’s tell that story, starting with some background.

Nice as the San Fernando Valley is — or because it’s nice, I suppose — there was a rash of burglaries there in November 2023. There was neighborhood chatter and news coverage about “dinnertime burglaries,” because many of them were taking place between 7 and 8 PM.

• On November 13, burglars shattered the glass on Tim Gaspar’s home, pepper-sprayed his 14-year-old German Shepherd, and ransacked the home. They left just twelve minutes before he and his family arrived home.

• On an unspecified date, four or five men in dark clothing and masks shattered the glass in another home’s door and invaded the home — when the family was home.

• Another time, an elderly couple’s home was ransacked with the couple still inside.

• One November 29, masked and hooded burglars stole about $150,000 worth of goods from a Granada Hills home while the family — man, wife, and newborn — were out shopping. The man was alerted by a baby monitor alarm, and its video camera showed four armed and hooded thieves at work. And then that same home was broken into again, probably by the same people, just a few nights later.

That said, there were plenty going on at other times, too. Resident Pat Walsh said, “We’ve been having burglaries every day in this neighborhood. So I’m not surprised at all. It’s been a real problem. Residents here are fed up.”

And so it was that at 5 AM — definitely not dinnertime — on Saturday, December 2, three or four men advanced on a home in Granada Hills. Inside the home were a man, a grandmother, and a toddler. (The homeowner, his mother, and his child, perhaps? Seems likely enough.)

They entered the property. The homeowner was probably asleep at the time, waking to the noises the burglars made. He armed himself, went to investigate, and caught them red-handed.

One of the burglars pointed a gun at him, but the homeowner fired his own weapon first.

One burglar suffered two gunshot wounds and died at the scene; he was found with the homeowner’s property in his possession. He was later identified as 20-year-old Abednego Adre.

A trail of blood led the police to conclude that one of the others had been shot as well. The criminals’ car, a black BMW, was found at the scene.

There’s some conflicting information about the other intruders: Most reports say that the three (or maybe two) scattered on foot, but in the KTLA 5 video, there are images of at least one man in handcuffs, and they imply that it’s not the homeowner. One ABC 7 report says that “Adre and two other suspects are accused of breaking into a home” but doesn’t mention the other two by name, and I can’t find articles related to them.

A final note: I appreciate the fact that KTLA 5 made room in their video coverage for Deputy Police Chief Alan Hamilton’s statement that “anyone inside of their residence that’s faced with a deadly threat, and is perceived as a deadly threat, has a right to protect himself.”

I’ll let an anonymous neighbor wrap this up for us: “The suspects messed with the wrong homeowner. So hopefully this will stop them. It makes me feel good that people are able to protect their homes and stop these guys.”

Sources

The original LAPD news release is still available on Twitter, as is a series of tweets from the LAPD Public Information Officer.

KTLA 5 did a great job covering this story and related news, including the “dinnertime burglaries” (more, more) that provide the violent context for this story. It’s worth watching the video that accompanies that article. In addition, they did a great job of getting the police response and the neighborhood reactions. Along with the textual article, they also gave a solid three minutes to on-air coverage of this shooting.

ABC 7 had two articles, one talking about the incident and the other naming the dead burglar and noting that he had recently been acquitted in a drive-by shooting case.

There were a number of other local articles, including Fox 11, My News LA, Westside Current, Hollywood LA News, City News Service, the LA Times, and the Los Angeles Daily News.

In addition, there was national-level coverage from BizPacReview and CBS News, and a now-deleted article from the Daily Mail. (I can see it in my search results, but the page itself is gone.)

From the 2A community, I saw coverage in what appears to be a local gun store blog for G4 Firearms, GunsAmerica, and USACarry.

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