Good Guy with a Gun #44: Fort Worth, TX
Original incident: December 14, 2023. A 14-year-old is shot while committing burglary. It’s a tragedy, sure, but should the mother of four who killed him be evicted because she had a gun?
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This story is as important for its aftermath as for the shooting itself.
Incident
The story itself is simple.
A’Leah Wallace was a single mother of four girls who lived in subsidized housing in Fort Worth, Texas. Over the course of a few weeks, someone had attempted burglary at her apartment four times. (She wasn’t home during those burglaries.) It got bad enough that she acquired a gun for protection.
At 1:22 AM on a Thursday morning, someone was at it again. She called 911, and police responded. After doing what they could, they left to finish up the paperwork.
Around 3 AM, while she was still awake, she heard noises. “I was cleaning my living room sweeping my floor, and I heard my window start going back up,” she said. “So I went, and I stood in the hallway. And I could see him standing at the window, lifting it up. I just shot.”
Devin Baker, who was coming in through her eight-year-old daughter’s window, was only fourteen when he died. He was an eighth grader at Rosemount Middle School.
Baker’s death is a tragedy, no doubt. One could have hoped that the child would reform his life had he not been shot. Fox 4 interviewed a man who mentors troubled youth, who was supposed to meet with Baker later that day. “Today was just like, dang. I just... I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “Even though I expect that, unfortunately, in the community and the culture, I wasn’t expecting that today. And that hurt me.” Indeed.
But, without belittling the tragedy of a young life cut short, we shouldn’t blame A’Leah Wallace. “I have four daughters,” she said. “It’s just me and my four daughters that stay there. I just was protecting my daughters. I’m devastated that he was 14. I hate that. I literally do. And I’m so sorry. But at that point, I had to think about my babies. I didn’t know he was 14 when he was on the other side of that window. All I knew was that somebody could come in and hurt me or my kids. That’s it.”
Who can argue with that?
And for all that Baker could have reformed, at that moment he was a dangerous criminal. My calendar is full of stories of young people who were attempting to inflict serious harm on other people.
Aftermath
So that’s the incident. There were two follow-on issues related to Wallace’s shooting.
The first was the grand jury. This is common: It’s not a full trial, and the person being investigated isn’t even there. Whatever information prosecutors have gets sent to the grand jury to let “the people” decide whether there’s sufficient evidence to indict her.
In this case, the grand jury “no-billed” Wallace, so no charges were filed. Great.
The second was her housing.
Recall that Wallace and her daughters lived in a federally subsidized apartment. Wallace had called the apartment administration and told them that people were breaking in, but they refused to let her have a gun -- it went against their lease.
After this incident occurred... well, as Wallace said:
The apartments called and told me that I was not supposed to have a gun at all, even though I kept calling them and telling them somebody was breaking in. They told me I could not have a gun, and I have 30 days to vacate. I feel like I’m back at square one. I was there for six years, and now I don’t know what to do.”
This caused a national uproar. The New York Post, American Thinker, the Daily Caller, and a host of well-known news outlets and blogs carried the story.
As it happened, the apartments backpedaled: There was no law saying that guns shouldn’t be allowed in government housing, and the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center went to work for her. “This one was just such a clear-cut case of violation of her rights under state law that we just had to intervene,” DEAC representative Mark Melton said.
Nevertheless, her kids were traumatized, and Wallace wanted to leave. She created a GoFundMe that ultimately raised over $72,000 to help her get started again.
We wish her and her children the best.
Sources
There are too many sources for this story for me to provide a comprehensive review. Instead, I’ll just note that the following Fox 4 stories do a great job of covering it through every phase:
the initial shooting
a follow-up with A’Leah Wallace, in which Wallace mentions the fact that she’d being evicted
a follow-up the next day with a headline that asks, Can the Fort Worth woman living in subsidized housing be evicted for having a gun?
coverage of the grand jury no-bill (lack of indictment)
and, finally, coverage of the fact that she wouldn’t be evicted.
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
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