Good Guy with a Gun #49: Arlington, TX
Original incident: December 20, 2023. A man finds three other men breaking into his son's car. He confronts them. They start shooting.
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When Greg Willis went to bed on a Tuesday night, he probably didn’t expect crime to find him. Not that his neighborhood in Arlington, Texas was perfect — there had been two car break-ins nearby about five months prior — but it wasn’t a hotbed of criminal activity.
But his Ring camera went off at 2 AM. He saw someone in his son’s car. (Look for yourself: The video is available at the NBC 5 link.) He called out to his son, “Hey, is that you outside?” He got an answer from inside: “No.”
So he and his son got together and went to investigate.
It turned out to be not one man, but three, and they didn’t run: They opened fire.
Willis’s son took cover behind a neighbor’s truck while Willis himself returned fire. That was enough to send the burglars running.
The truck’s window was blown out, but no person was hit in the shootout. “I could have been shot, or they could have been shot,” Willis said. “It was a lot of bullets ringing out.”
Someone called the police, who came quickly and set up a perimeter around the area. They eventually found two of the men, 19-year-old Keaundre Lemon and 18-year-old Ahmad Bland, holed up in a neighbor’s shed. They also recovered a handgun. The third man was on the loose, and I can’t find any record of him being captured.
The two men were arrested. Lemon was charged with criminal trespass and also booked for an outstanding warrant, while Bland was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and criminal trespass.
Keaundre Lemon, left, and Ahmad Brand, right.
If it matters, this appears to be Bland’s only arrest (in Texas, at least), while Keaundre Lemon was arrested at least four other times.
11/24/2023, Tarrant County
Discharge Firearm in Certain Municipalities, Deadly Conduct Discharge Firearm
12/20/2023, Tarrant County
This incident
01/23/2024, Tarrant County
Possession of Marijuana Less than 2 Ounces, Fail To Identify Fugitive Intent to Give False Information, Credit Card Or Debit Card Abuse, burglary of vehicles
03/26/2024, Dallas County
Possession of a controlled substance in Penalty Group 2 (including ecstasy, PCP, amphetamines, and others) of at least two but less than 400 grams.
08/22/2024, Tarrant County
Deadly conduct discharge firearm, credit card or debit card abuse, unlicensed carrying weapon
Interesting that one of those arrests was only a month later, and also involved burglary of vehicles.
At any rate, the police couldn’t say whether the other break-ins were related to this one, but Willis delivered a message to any criminals who might come to his area: “You can’t run to the well too many times without getting caught. Stop the stupidity, because you’re going to end up getting hurt.”
An anomaly
One item to note: If you look at the NBC 5 video segment, about 39 seconds into the clip, it looks like two random people are walking around Willis’s truck. At 2 AM. While bullets are flying. Then the segment transitions to Willis, and we don’t see it again. Does anyone else think that’s weird?
Sources
NBC 5 did a great job with this story.
They got all of the detail, interviewed Willis, interviewed neighbors, gave us the Ring video, and even got additional video footage from the neighbor whose car had previously been broken into.
This exemplifies the human side of the Defensive Gun Use. It really is a Good Guy with a Gun story. Take the few minutes to watch the video: Willis is such a normal guy who just happened to need his firearm that night.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gave a decent, if somewhat bare-bones, summary of the event.
An alternative outlet, The Dallas Express (”The People’s Paper”) covered it using NBC 5 as a source, and also talked about other vehicle-related crimes in the area.
2A community coverage came from Kimber Pierce at GunsAmerica and Dave Urbanski at Blaze Media.
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