Good Guy with a Gun #43: South Bend, IN
Original incident: December 14, 2023. As a homeowner and his wife return home, their alarm system says something's amiss. Then an old man rushes at him with a chainsaw.
On a Thursday night, just after 9 PM in South Bend, Indiana, a homeowner and his wife pulled up to their house on Beale Street. As they prepared to go inside, their security system pinged an alarm. The husband told his wife to stay in the car while he checked the rear fence gate.
That’s when a man emerged, charging toward him “brandishing” a chainsaw. (It’s unclear whether it was running or not.) The homeowner drew his handgun and fired a single shot.
Chainsaw Man went down. The couple called 911 right away and waited for police and an emergency medical team. They took him to the hospital, where he succumbed to his wound.
Investigators discovered that the man, later identified as 68-year-old Richard Davis, had been threatening the homeowner with his own chainsaw, which Davis had taken from the garage. The police confirmed the rest of the homeowners’ story using video footage, logs, and of course the stolen chainsaw lying nearby.
“Deemed justified” vs. “No charges filed”
Let me say at the outset that there are no legal issues with our homeowners. Everything that follows is a critique of the press, not a continuation of the story of the shooting itself. The GGWAG is a GGWAG, period.
The St. Joseph County Prosecutor reviewed everything and decided not to press charges. Multiple stories say the homicide was “deemed justified,” which isn’t quite true.
Normally I wouldn’t care much about this technicality; from a practical standpoint, there’s no issue with the homicide (defined as the killing of one person by another) being justified (it’s clear that it was), but I’m poking at it because the Prosecutor’s office and South Bend PD went out of their way to say the following:
After reviewing the investigation into this incident, the Prosecutor’s Office cannot disprove that the shooting of Mr. Davis constituted a justifiable homicide under I.C. 35-41-3-2(c). As such, no criminal charges will be filed in connection with his death.
While it is clear that Mr. Davis’ death is a Homicide (Indiana Law defines Homicide as “death at the hands of another”), it does not determine whether that homicide was justified.... [Emphasis added in both paragraphs.]
So, to be clear: The homicide wasn’t “deemed justified.” Rather, the Prosecutor’s office determined that they couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t justified.
The Country Herald is an example of a press outlet that got it right: Their headline is Indiana Homeowner Kills Intruder Wielding Chainsaw, No Charges Filed.
WSBT 22 gets it wrong, with a headline of Beale Street shooting of intruder ruled justifiable, says prosecutor and a first line that reads, “The December 14, 2023 homicide on Beale Street has been ruled justifiable by the prosecutor’s office.” This is despite the fact that they go into the (unnecessary, in my opinion) details about the “couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt” stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. Practically speaking, “deemed justified” and “couldn’t prove that it wasn’t justified” means the same thing: No charges filed, the shooter is treated as the victim rather than a criminal, and so on. It’s roughly the same thing as juries returning verdicts of “not guilty” rather than “innocent” — the jury doesn’t determine that you’re innocent, they determine that the prosecution didn’t prove you guilty. So if someone were to say that this semantic technicality means that the GGWAG is really guilty, and that the DA just couldn’t prove it, I’d have to point and laugh mercilessly.
So yes, this is lawyer-level hair-splitting. That said, there are a lot of stories in which the police or DA really does say that the incident was self-defense or justifiable homicide, and this isn’t one of them. Language matters, and I’d like a little better precision in the news.
The funny thing is, the news outlets really didn’t have to discuss the distinction at all. If they had just said, “no charges filed” without explaining the nuances, everyone would get the right idea and there would be no confusion about it.
Sources
Most of these stories were written at the time of the incident and then updated when law enforcement announced that no charges would be filed. Here are the sources I could find, most of which are essentially summaries of the police report.
The police report on Facebook.
WNDU 16 wrote an article and gave the story some airtime. Unfortunately, they do claim that this shooting was “deemed justifiable”.
The Country Herald’s article is solid and and is the only one that gets the deemed justified / no charges filed distinction fully right. Nice work from a local outlet, beating out the affiliates in this way.
ABC 57 gave an initial article and a follow-up. WVPE 88.1, WSBT 22, WIBC 93.1, and News/Talk 95.3 MNC all give good coverage to the incident. All of these munge the distinction.
In the 2A community, the NRA linked to WNDU’s coverage in an NRA Armed Citizen newsletter. Dave Urbanski wrote up the incident at Blaze Media. Guns Save Life (an Illinois-based organization) included it in a round-up of Armed Citizen stories in a newsletter (link in PDF). Finally, G4 Firearms out of California posted about this on their blog.
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
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